Something the Cat Dragged In (4 page)

“Turned him down flat as a pancake,” Mrs. Lomax replied, “though some said it was on account of that wife of his. Meaning no offense, her being your next-door neighbor.”

“None taken.”

Shandy would have blackballed Mirelle Feldster himself, if he’d ever got the chance. She’d been a continuing pain in his neck ever since he’d got his appointment to Balaclava Agricultural College. “They must have fantastically strict membership requirements, then?”

“Fantastic isn’t the word for it, Professor. First you have to mail in a formal letter of application, along with your birth certificate—or a copy of it, anyway—and character references from your minister and two members of the church.”

“What if you don’t go to church?”

“Then you might as well forget it because you’re licked before you start. And, of course, if you happen not to be a Protestant, that puts the kibosh on you, too, though they don’t come straight out and say so. Then Mrs. Pommell invites you to tea so the members can look you over and ask you a lot of embarrassing questions. If you haven’t folded up and quit by then, you’re supposed to submit an essay on ‘Why I am dedicated to the preservation of our heritage.’ ”

“Good Lord!”

“And after all that, they take a secret vote on whether to let you in. One single nay and that’s the end. No second chances.”

“Considering the requirements, I’m surprised they have any members to vote,” said Shandy. “Who does belong to this august assemblage?”

“Well, there’s Mr. and Mrs. Pommell, as I mentioned. He’s head of the First Balaclava County Guaranteed National Trust, Savings, and Loan. You know him, I expect, seeing as how you folks have an account there.”

That could have gone without saying. The Guaranteed was the only bank in town. “I believe I’ve met Mrs. Pommell, too,” Shandy agreed.

“I shouldn’t be surprised. She’s president of the Garden Club and a few more things, as she’d be first to tell you if you gave her half a chance. And there’s Henry Hodger the lawyer, and Congressman Sill who served one term in the state legislature back when Alvan T. Fuller was governor. He’s still active in politics, or claims he is. Goes to Boston and hangs around the State House. Making a pest of himself, most likely.”

This observation was also redundant. Shandy’d had the misfortune to hear Sill orate on far too many occasions. “Does Mrs. Sill belong?” he asked.

“She used to, but she’s been bedridden ever since she had that stroke about ten years ago, poor soul. Just lies there staring at the ceiling, though if I had to choose between that and old Sill’s face, I daresay I’d take the ceiling, too. And there’s Lot Lutt who used to be on the board of directors over at the soap factory. He’s a widower. And William Twerks, who’s never done a hand’s turn at anything in his life to the best of my knowledge.”

“Twerks is the hulking chap who lives in that brown-and-yellow house with the fancy trimmings isn’t he?” Shandy remarked. “I’ve had a few encounters with him.”

Twerks had, in fact, wandered over to the campus on various occasions for the purpose of ogling female students doing fieldwork in their sawed-off jeans, and been dealt with by them in various imaginative and interesting ways.

Mrs. Lomax’s lips twitched. She knew, of course. “Yes, Twerks is quite a one for the ladies, they say, though he’s never stuck to one long enough to matter. Anyway, he goes to the meetings alone. And that’s the lot, as far as I know, except for Professor Ungley, and I guess you can’t count him any more. He claimed to be curator of that museum they’ve talked about starting for the past forty years or so, but never get around to. He’d gas along about how much work it was trying to get the place organized, but he never did anything as far as I could make out. Though he did keep a lot of records and papers in that big filing cabinet down in his study, so maybe he was working on those when I used to think he was just snoozing in his chair. Serve me right for judging if he was.”

“He never showed you any—er—plans or documents or whatever that he was working on?”

“No, and I never looked to see.”

“Naturally not, but don’t you think we might have a glance now?”

“Seeing as how that’s what I got you down here for.” Mrs. Lomax picked up her keys. “The thing is, Professor, somebody’s been in his place. You follow me and I’ll show you what I mean. I haven’t touched anything.”

She paused to unlock Ungley’s door. “I’d meant to clean up, after I got back home from the to-do down behind the clubhouse. I figured the heirs would be nosing around, and I wouldn’t want them thinking I didn’t keep the place decent.”

“You don’t know who they are?”

“Nary a notion, unless he left everything to the college, which would be sensible, or to the Balaclavian Society that doesn’t need it and wouldn’t use it, which would be more like him. I suppose there must be a relative or two somewhere because there always are, but he never mentioned any and they never came to see him. As for who his friends were, I expect you’d know better than I. He must have had his old cronies up at the college.”

“Well—er—actually, no,” Shandy confessed. “Most faculty members of his—er—vintage aren’t around any longer, and those who are, like John Enderble, have their—er—sundry occupations. I myself hardly knew Professor Ungley, except to nod to in the faculty dining room when we happened to be there at the same times”

Mrs. Lomax nodded. “Then it looks as if he only had that lot from the club. They’re all well-heeled themselves, so they wouldn’t need any inheritance from him. Though I suppose he might have left ’em his penknives out of sentiment.” Mrs. Lomax could be pretty funny at times, though nobody was ever sure whether or not she was doing it on purpose. “That’s assuming he ever bestirred himself to make a will. If he did, he’d have got Henry Hodger to write it up for him, and you can bet Henry won’t lose any time coming forward if he smells another fee in it for him.”

Shandy was willing to take Mrs. Lomax’s word for that. However, Henry Hodger’s hypothetical fee was not the matter uppermost in his mind at the moment. “You say the place has been broken into? How can you tell? It looks perfectly tidy to me.”

“Oh, it’s neat enough as far as that goes,” said Mrs. Lomax, “but there’s little things I can see that you wouldn’t ever notice. Nor would anybody else except Professor Ungley if he was alive. And he’d have come jawing at me about ’em if it meant dragging me out of my warm bed at three o’clock in the morning.”

“So you’re saying it happened after he was dead.”

“No I’m not, because I don’t know when he died. That mush-brained Fred Ottermole never thought to ask Mrs. Pommell when the meeting broke up, for one thing. I’d guess they must have called it quits sometime around eleven because that was when the professor usually got back here, though don’t ask me what he found worth staying for in the first place. If he left with the rest of ’em, which he must have or she wouldn’t have said so with five other people in a position to call her a liar, then I’d say he was probably waylaid a few minutes later. After he’d turned the corner off Main Street, like as not. Unless he hung around down there by himself in the cold, which doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

“Most unlikely, I should think,” Shandy agreed. “We might be safe in assuming whoever broke in here knew it was safe to do so because Ungley wouldn’t be coming back. Otherwise, there’d have been the risk of his making a row, which you’d have heard.”

“I certainly would. Nothing wrong with my ears so far, knock wood. Furthermore, I sat up late reading some foolish book I got from the library—it was a detective story but she wasn’t about to confess that to Professor Shandy—“and Edmund was asleep in my lap the whole time. He’d have hopped up and made a fuss the way he always does if a stranger so much as sets foot on the doorstep. It was about twenty minutes to twelve when I let him out for the night. Come to think of it, I noticed then that the light over the front steps was still on.”

“Wouldn’t that have told you Ungley wasn’t in yet?”

“Yes, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I knew he was giving the talk, see, and not to speak ill of the dead, once Professor Ungley got started, he wasn’t easy to stop. I figured he must still be down there chewing the fat with those other old gaffers. Now, there’s a funny thing.”

“What is?”

“The light was off when I came down this morning. I’d have noticed if it wasn’t. That proves somebody was here, because I know I left it on.”

“There’s no chance Ungley—er—came in and went out again?”

“Him? Make the trip twice? I might have believed it if I’d seen it, but I didn’t, so I won’t. Besides, he’d still have left the light on, wouldn’t he, because he’d expect to be coming back and have to see his way in again.”

“True enough,” said Shandy. “So you got to bed around midnight, would you say?”

“Six minutes before, on the dot. I’d got my night things on before I sat down to read, so all I had to do was wash my face and put my teeth to soak. I noticed the time because I keep a clock beside the bed, for company mostly. Anyway, I turned out the lamp and went to sleep on the dot, as is my habit, and never woke up till half-past six this morning. And it wasn’t till I’d had my breakfast and done the floor, this being Thursday, that Edmund came caterwauling through the cathole with that hairpiece in his mouth. Soon as I made out what it was, I decided I’d better sneak it back to Professor Ungley’s flat before he woke up, and that’s how it all started.”

“I’d say you’ve behaved with remarkable perspicacity, Mrs. Lomax. Now could you point out those—er—discrepancies that aren’t apparent to the untrained eye?”

“Well, the first thing I noticed was the sofa cushions.”

Mrs. Lomax explained the cushion situation in detail, and threw in a few dark hints about the antimacassars for good measure. Then she led Shandy into the study. “See that?” She was pointing to Ungley’s reclining chair. “That’s where he always sat.”

“It—er—appears a trifle elongated for sitting,” Shandy ventured.

“That’s my point. The chair’s built on some kind of balancing spring. When you sit down and want to lean back, the back goes down and the footrest comes up. When you want to get up again, you sort of scrooch forward and the chair comes up straight so you don’t have to dislocate your sciatica trying to get out of the pesky thing.”

Mrs. Lomax gave the chair a gentle nudge by way of demonstration. Sure enough, the back popped up and the footrest flattened itself demurely between the front legs. Gone was the recliner. In its place sat the sort of ordinary club chair one might find in any well-appointed home whose owners didn’t object too strenuously to plastic upholstery in tobacco-spit brown.

“M’yes. That’s significant.”

Shandy wasn’t sure what the significance was. The intruder might have happened to brush against the chair in passing and been too preoccupied to notice its antic behavior, or in too big a hurry to bother putting it back upright, or too ignorant in the ways of reclining chairs to know how. On the other hand, somebody might have pushed it back in order to search more easily under the cushions.

The most logical person would have been Ungley himself, searching for the eyeglasses, the penknife, or the lecture notes he might have dropped during his pre-meeting siesta. Thinking back to his own bachelor days, though, Peter was inclined to side with Mrs. Lomax. He recalled how seldom he himself had been wont to enter the front room Helen had lately turned into a hotbed of social activity. No doubt his own sofa pillows had remained in whatever position Mrs. Lomax had chosen to leave them after she’d cleaned, and no doubt he’d guiltily sneaked them back to that position if he’d been so unchancy as to disturb one.

As to the recliner, supposing Ungley had been the one to shove it flat, wouldn’t he have flicked it upright again, if only to help straighten himself up? Ungley had, after all, been an old man, and that silver cane he’d toted around must have been more than a status symbol.

It was odd about that weighted handle. It was odd Shandy hadn’t thought of doing what should have been done before he started horsing around with reclining chairs. Blasting himself for an idiot, he asked, “Mrs. Lomax, may I use your telephone?”

“Why not use Professor Ungley’s?” she replied, thinking perhaps of her clean kitchen floor.

Why not, indeed? It was unlikely the now more than hypothetical intruder would have rung up a pal for a chat. And if he had, being adroit enough to get in and out without waking Mrs. Lomax or falling over Edmund, he’d no doubt have had sense enough not to plaster the place with fingerprints. Shandy picked up the phone that was on Ungley’s desk, and called Harry Goulson.

“Goulson? This is Peter Shandy. Have you begun your Ptolemaic rites on Professor Ungley’s body yet? Then don’t. I’d like to see it first. I’ll be over in a few minutes. And—er—mummy’s the word.”

Mrs. Lomax gave him a look and he was ashamed, but it was too late now. He hung up and put on an air of brisk efficiency. “Now what about that file cabinet you spoke of?”

“It’s right here behind the desk.”

“Ah yes, the desk. Perhaps we might just have a look in here while we’re about it.”

This was where Ungley had allegedly spent so many hours toiling at the History of Balaclava County he’d claimed to have been at work on for the past quarter-century. According to the notes Shandy found, though, he’d only got as far as 1832, a year in which nothing of any particular significance appeared to have happened.

The drawers were unlocked and held only trifles: some Balaclavian Society stationery yellowed around the edges, a few stub pens and small bottles encrusted with long-dried ink, notes for lectures that hadn’t been delivered at the college since Thorkjeld Svenson had summarily emeritized Ungley on his accession to power in 1952. There was also a copy of the commencement exercises for that year at which Ungley had been singled out for special recognition since the president had a heart as big as his feet and seldom lopped off a head without some twinge of remorse.

There were a fair number of other things, but none of the clutter usually found in people’s desks. Mrs. Lomax had been right about Ungley’s finicking ways. Anybody who’d take the trouble to stack forty-eight paper clips in neat rows of six apiece within their little box would not be apt to leave the sofa pillows askew. Shandy swiveled the desk chair around to face the files.