Something the Cat Dragged In (3 page)

Mrs. Pommell thought it was all too sad for words but there was nothing else to be done, was there? Dr. Melchett, conscious of the fact that his own wife was about to give a hospital volunteers’ luncheon at which Mrs. Pommell was slated to be guest of honor, agreed there wasn’t.

Mrs. Lomax officially turned the hairpiece over to Harry Goulson, knowing Professor Ungley would have hated to be caught dead without it whatever the circumstances. Then she went home to wash up her breakfast dishes and brood.

She didn’t brood long. There was the cane to be returned to the downstairs flat, and that glass of milk still on the drainboard going sour, like as not. The now tenantless landlady took her own keys and went to redd the place up. The professor had never once had a relative to call while he was alive, to the best of her knowledge, but Betsy Lomax knew human nature. Once news of his death got around, they’d come scampering out of the woodwork to see whether there might be anything in it for them. She was not about to have any long-lost Ungleys claiming Elizabeth Swope Lomax hadn’t known enough to take proper care of her tenant.

As she puttered around wiping off a speck of dust here and twitching a slipcover there, she gradually realized things were not precisely as they ought to have been. Professor Ungley, indolent as he was, had been persnickety about his flat. For instance, he’d always wanted the sofa pillows, three rock-hard squares of a particularly bilious green, arranged just so: two at the ends and one in the exact middle, all balanced diagonally on their points instead of sitting flat on their bottoms.

Mrs. Lomax had never been able to see that it mattered how she left them, since he hardly ever set foot in the parlor except to find fault on cleaning day, but she’d always heard about her dereliction in that tiresome, yappy old voice of his if she hadn’t put them back just right after she’d vacuumed the furniture, so she’d learned to humor the man and avoid the lecture. Today, the pillows were sitting flat. The middle one was off-center and the seat cushion pushed forward a trifle, as if somebody had been rummaging behind it.

People did rummage behind sofa cushions, of course. She did herself, often enough. Edmund was wont to amuse himself by batting her thimble, her reading glasses, or whatever other small object she happened to be most urgently in need of at any given moment into some such hidey-hole. But why should Professor Ungley go dropping things there? She doubted if he’d ever sat on that sofa since he’d moved into the flat. He never entertained, so there’d been no occasion for a guest to come mussing the place up. Not an invited one, anyway.

Where the professor had spent most of his time was in the room he’d called his study, lolling in one of those patent reclining chairs with a back that went down and a footrest that came up. That was the real place to look. Mrs. Lomax got no farther than the door before her trained eye caught the signs. “Sticks out like a sore thumb,” she told Edmund, who’d come along to be sociable. “Somebody’s been.”

Books that had been lined up on the shelves as if with a ruler and probably never taken down since Professor Ungley stopped professing were now noticeably out of alignment. One desk drawer wasn’t quite shut. When she slid it all the way open, reaching from underneath and shielding her hand with the apron she was still wearing, for Mrs. Lomax had taken to reading detective stories lately, she found its contents in what both she and its late owner would have considered a complete welter.

“He never did this,” she informed Edmund.

Even if the old man had been hunting for those foolish penknives, and a more boring subject for an evening’s entertainment she personally couldn’t imagine; even if he’d put off the looking till the last minute, which was entirely possible because procrastinating was what he’d always done best, not to speak evil of the dead, but facts were facts; he still wouldn’t have mussed up the drawer like this because then he’d have had the nuisance of putting it right again.

Besides, Professor Ungley would have known exactly where his penknives were and spent weeks before the meeting fiddling around with them and planning out the talk hardly anybody was going to hear. And trotting them out to bore his landlady with, no doubt, if he’d got the chance, which he hadn’t because they’d had the church rummage sale this week and Mrs. Lomax hadn’t been around much. She ought to be over at the vestry now, making sure the cleanup committee was doing a halfway decent job, which it probably wasn’t. Instead, she went back upstairs and picked up the telephone.

“HELLO, MRS. SHANDY? I
expect the professor’s busy teaching or grading papers or suchlike, but I was wondering if he’d have time to drop down to my place for a minute.”

“You mean right away?” gasped Helen Shandy, a petite blonde who could have been the sort of Helen whom E. A. Poe had in mind when he alluded to Psyche and possibly even to those Nicean barks of yore, though the latter point is debatable.

“Sooner the better.” Mrs. Lomax wasn’t on a party line any more, but she remained laconic on the phone from force of habit. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.”

Helen was startled at the mere fact of Mrs. Lomax’s calling, let alone her request. The woman had been showing up faithfully every week to clean the little red-brick house on the Crescent since Peter Shandy’s marriage just as she’d done when he was a bachelor. She was chatty enough when she came to work and ready to stop and pass the time of day if Helen and Peter happened to bump into her at the drugstore or the supermarket, but she had old-fashioned ideas about town and gown. If she said it was important, it was.

“Peter’s up at school right now,” Helen replied, “but I’ll get hold of him as fast as I can. Will you be at home for a while?”

“I’ll be here.”

Mrs. Lomax hung up feeling a trifle easier. Helen, on the other hand, was in a state by the time she caught Peter at his office.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re there! Do you have a student with you, or a class in two minutes or anything?”

“Neither and nothing, mine own. I’m just pondering on how do I love thee. Let me count the ways. It may help to get my mind off the most moronic set of test papers I’ve ever had the misfortune to grade. Would you believe at least three quarters of my freshman agronomy class don’t know how to spell fungicide?”

“Certainly I would. Furthermore, they can’t look it up in the dictionary because nobody ever made them learn the alphabet. Darling, could we shelve the fungicide for the moment? Mrs. Lomax wants to talk with you.”

“If it’s about a new mop, I flatly refuse. That woman has a mania for mops. She’ll mop us out of house and home.”

“It’s not mops. She wants you to go down right away.”

“Down where?”

“To her place. It’s all uphill from there, isn’t it?”

“I’m sure she finds it so. What in Sam Hill for?”

“I don’t know, but you’d better go. She said it was important.”

“Good God! Then I’m off in a puff of smoke. These young ignorami will have to sweat for their test results. Do ’em good.”

Peter grabbed the mackinaw he’d slung over the back of his office chair, shoved his arms into the sleeves, and took the stairs of the century-old building at a pretty nippy pace for a man of fifty-six and a bit. Peter wasn’t particularly tall, nor was he short. He wasn’t thin and he wasn’t fat. Helen honestly believed him to be the handsomest man alive. Most people would have said Professor Shandy wasn’t bad-looking, all things considered, and wasn’t it a shame his hair was getting so thin on top.

If there is truth in the agricultural homily that grass can’t grow on a busy street, then Shandy’s hiatal hirsuteness was only natural. During the past year, he’d revealed a new talent and acquired an unexpected reputation. To be sure, he’d already been world-famous, or at least well-known among turnip growers in those parts of the world where turnip growing is taken seriously. It was one thing to be known as co-developer of that super rutabaga, Brassica
napobrassica balaclaviensis,
or Balaclava Buster. It was something else to have become Balaclava’s replacement for Philo Vance. In short, the locals had found out he was good at solving mysteries.

Mrs. Lomax, after he’d ascended the stairs to her tidy flat and paid his respects to Edmund, lost not a moment in letting him know why she wanted him.

“I don’t care what Fred Ottermole says, nor Dr. Melchett neither. Professor Ungley would never on the face of this earth have gone traipsing around behind the clubhouse in the dark, no matter what. He was kind of a coward, between you and me and the lamppost. He used to run on about crime in the streets and all that stuff he got out of the Boston papers till you wondered why he didn’t quit taking ’em if they scared him so. You mark my words, either he took somebody with him or else he was made to go. And it amounted to the same thing in the long run.”

“M’yes,” said Shandy, who’d been buttonholed by Ungley on the subject of general perfidy a few times himself. “I’m inclined to your point of view, Mrs. Lomax. And your theory is that his own cane may have been used to kill him?”

“Well, it’s heavy enough. Dr. Melchett said he judged the handle was filled with lead, though why Professor Ungley would carry a thing like that when he’d barely lift a hand to tie his own shoes is beyond me. And it’s got a pointy end that could have punched a hole in his skull, which is what killed him. And there was a powerful lot of dried blood all over the back of his head and next to none at all on that harrow peg he’s supposed to have tripped and fell on. I don’t know if he was killed outright or just stunned and left out there to die, but it wouldn’t have mattered much, would it? I mean to say, he wasn’t a strong, vigorous person like Mrs. Ames.”

Jemima Ames, the village’s most recent bludgeoning victim until now, had been found dead in Peter Shandy’s own living room. Mrs. Lomax must have realized she could have been more tactful than to bring that up, for she hurried on.

“An old man like him, out there where nobody’d be apt to see him, on a night like that—the weatherman said it was going to freeze again, which it did because those weeds were all black and slimy like they get after a frost—and there was the cane, right beside him. I don’t believe that harrow yarn for one second. I think he was hit first and then propped up there beside the harrow and some of his blood daubed on the peg. Fred fell for the trick, because Fred’s got about as much sense as a good-sized louse, and Dr. Melchett went along with him because the doctor’s got about as much backbone as Fred has brains.”

Shandy thought Mrs. Lomax’s estimate was a pretty fair one, but refrained from saying so. “Still, neither of them could find any bloodstains on the cane?”

“A little soap and water would fix that up soon enough, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know.” Shandy took the cane she’d brought back from Professor Ungley’s apartment, hefted it, and regarded the intricately carved fox with a good deal of interest. “It might take a fair amount of scrubbing to get all the blood out of those deep grooves. And where would the alleged murderer have got the soap and water?”

“In the clubhouse, of course. They’ve got indoor plumbing, though you might not think so. What if Professor Ungley didn’t forget his keys after all? The person that killed him could have found them in his pocket, gone in and washed the cane off, then left the keys on the table where Mrs. Pommell found them, couldn’t he?”

“But didn’t you say Mrs. Pommell claimed Ungley had left them there after his lecture?”

“She thought he must have when Fred couldn’t find the keys in his pocket,” Mrs. Lomax amended. “Then she went in and there they were, so she figured she’d been right, but that doesn’t prove she was.”

“True enough. And how did Mrs. Pommell get in?”

“She used her own key, or rather her husband’s. She carries it for him because he has all those bank keys to tote around, as she took pains to let us know.”

“But why would her husband have a key to the clubhouse?”

“She says all the members do. All the men, that is. Women don’t count, apparently. Anyway, I don’t know if there’s another woman but herself who goes to the meetings these days. She probably wouldn’t either, if it wasn’t so darned exclusive.”

“Um. Just for the sake of argument, Mrs. Lomax, can you think offhand of anybody who might possibly have a reason to kill Professor Ungley?”

“I might myself, if I’d got stuck for a whole evening having to listen to him maunder on about penknives,” she confessed. “Being as how I never got asked to join, though—”

“Penknives?” Shandy interrupted. “What in Sam Hill did he want to talk about penknives for?”

“It’s not so much why he wanted to do it as why the rest of ’em let him that flummoxes me. No wonder they can’t get any new members. Not that they don’t do everything they can think of to keep people out.”

“Keep people out? What do you mean by that, Mrs. Lomax?”

“You ever tried to join the Balaclavian Society?”

“Er—no, I can’t say I have.”

In fact, Shandy couldn’t have said for a certainty that he’d ever been aware until today that the group existed. He’d noticed the clubhouse because he was a noticing man, and wondered why it was never open at a time when he might conceivably have wandered in to see what it was all about. He’d also noticed a general flavor of mild decay similar to that so aptly described by Oliver Wendell Holmes in
The Deacon’s Masterpiece,
and thought it rather surprising that nobody ever did anything to spruce the place up a bit, but he couldn’t recall ever having tried to find out why.

Since Mrs. Lomax was clearly waiting for him to ask what a person had to do to get in, he obliged. “How do you join?”

“Beats me,” she replied. “Most of the clubs in town want new members so bad they’re practically yanking ’em in off the street with meat hooks, but to my sure and certain knowledge, the Balaclavian Society hasn’t let in a single, solitary one for the past sixteen years. Even Harry Goulson doesn’t belong.”

“Good gad!” Shandy had been under the impression that the popular local mortician belonged to just about every organization in the county, even one or two of the women’s clubs. “And what about Jim Feldster?” Professor Feldster, who taught Fundamentals of Dairy Management, was an even more inveterate joiner than Goulson.