Mason bent over to look at it. “His?” he asked.
“Yep. Expensive, too, I guess. Smelled good when he was smokin’ it. Pipe and cigarettes are what I smoke.”
Mason continued to lean over the little table on which the ash tray reposed. Directly beside it was a card bearing the printed words, “GEORGE ALBER,” and, in a man’s handwriting, “Called to see about the kitten. Rang the bell, got no answer. Guess everything’s O.K. Knew Helen was worrying.”
Lunk lit a gas heater.
“Nice little place,” Mason said in a low voice.
“Uh huh. Over here’s my bedroom; other bedroom’s in back of that, with a bath between.”
Mason said, “Better close the doors between the bedrooms so Franklin won’t hear the phone ring.”
“That’s a good idea,” Lunk said. “I think the door from the bathroom to the boss’s room was left open. I closed the one from my room.”
He tiptoed into the bedroom, and Mason followed along close behind.
The bedroom was a small, square room, furnished with a cheap bureau, a table, a straight-backed chair, and a single iron bed with a thin mattress and sagging wire springs.
In the light which filtered through from the living room, Mason saw that the door to the bathroom was open, that the bed had not been made, and in the low spot in the center of that bed, lying in the middle of a soiled and crumpled sheet, curled up in a furry ball, was a sleeping kitten.
The drawers of the bureau had been pulled out, the contents dumped on the floor. A clothes closet had been opened and garments pulled out and dropped into a careless pile near the closet door.
Lunk, standing halfway between the door and the bed, looked around him in dazed surprise, and said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!”
Mason walked past Lunk through the open door into the bathroom and looked into the adjoining bedroom.
It was empty.
This bedroom was even smaller than the other. A window in the far side of the bedroom and which looked out on the alley, was standing wide open. A night breeze blew somewhat grimy lace curtains in bellying folds. Covers had been turned back on the spring cot. Clean sheets were slightly rumpled. A pillow case had a depression in it where a man’s head would have rested.
Lunk came to stand beside Mason, looking with open-mouthed dismay at the bed and the window.
“He’s skipped out,” he said ruefully. “If I could’ve got to Matilda Shore while he was still here, she’d have...”
He stopped talking suddenly as though afraid he had said too much.
Mason made a cursory examination of the room. “These bathroom doors open when you left?” he inquired.
“I think this one was, but the one into my room wasn’t. I was very careful to close it when I sneaked out.”
Mason indicated a second door. “Where does this go?”
“Kitchen. And then from the kitchen you can get to the living room.”
“You have to go through one of the bedrooms to get to the bathroom?”
“That’s right. This house is just a square box. The front room an’ kitchen on one side, an’ the two bedrooms on the other, with the bathroom in between the bedrooms.”
Mason said, “I notice this door to the kitchen is open a crack — just an inch or two.”
“Uh huh.”
Mason said, “You can see the kitten walked through that door. There are the tracks of a kitten outlined in something white.”
“That’s right.”
Mason bent over and touched his finger to the floor, rubbing it across one of the white tracks. “Feels something like flour. You can see where the kitten came through the door, walked over toward the bed. Yes, there are four tracks right together where the kitten must have stood to jump up on the bed. Then the kitten came down on the other side. You can see just a trace of the white powder here.”
“That’s right. But I don’t think that powder is flour.”
“Why not?”
“Because I keep my flour in a big tin, and I keep the lid on the tin. And I know the pantry door was closed.”
“Let’s take a look,” Mason said, going into the kitchen.
Lunk opened the door of a little pantry, said, “Of course, I don’t waste a lot of time keeping house. I cook my own grub and my cooking suits me all right. It might not suit some finicky housekeeper, but it suits me. Yep, there’s the cover on the can all right. Of course, I spill a little occasionally when I’m gettin’ it out for cooking. There’s a little on the floor around the can, and it looks like the cat was chasing a mouse or somethin’ an’ jumped right into that pile of stuff. That’s the most careless damn kitten I ever saw in my life. He ain’t got sense enough to be afraid of anything. He’ll run and butt his head up against a wall if he happens to be chasing something, or get on the back of a chair and fall down on his head. He’s just awful careless. Either ain’t got good sense, or don’t know enough to be afraid.”
Mason stood staring down at the flour. “If this pantry door was closed, how did the kitten get in here?”
Lunk thought that over. “Only one answer to that. Franklin was lookin’ for somethin’, an’ he came snooping around in here, an’ the cat followed him.”
Mason said, “How about that stuff in the front bedroom where the drawers have been pulled out and the clothes dumped on the floor?”
Lunk said, somewhat ruefully, “I guess I slipped up. Shore must have got up right after I went out. When he found I was gone, he realized I’d gone out to tell Matilda Shore that he was here. Gosh, why did I let him catch me at that?”
“And then you think he searched the place?” Mason asked.
“He must have, what with him opening the pantry door and all that.”
“What was he looking for?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You must have had something that Franklin Shore wanted.”
Lunk thought for a moment or two, then said, “I’m not certain but what Shore was down on his luck. He may have been looking for money.”
“Did you have any?”
Lunk hesitated, then said, “Yes, I had a little salted away.”
“Where?”
Lunk was silent for eight or ten seconds, and Mason said, “Come on. Come on. I’m not going to hold you up.”
“I kept it in the hip pocket of my best suit, hanging in the closet,” Lunk said.
“Well, let’s look and see if it’s there now.”
Lunk returned to the front room. The kitten opened its sleepy eyes, yawned, got up to its four feet, arched its back as high as it could possibly stretch, then reached out with its forepaws, elevated its hind legs, flexed its back in the other direction, and said, “Miaow.”
Mason laughed. “I think your kitten’s hungry. Have you got any milk in the house?”
Lunk said, “No fresh milk. I got some canned milk. Helen Kendal brought the kitten here so it wouldn’t get no more poison.”
He walked across to the pile of clothes, picked them up, and started going through the pockets. An expression of dismay came over his face.
“Cleaned out!” he muttered. “Damn him, he took every cent I had saved up.”
“Tell me exactly how much it was,” Mason said.
“Pretty close to three hundred dollars. He could get a long ways on that.”
“You think he wants to get away?” Mason asked.
Once more, Lunk’s mouth firmed into a position of sullen silence.
“Think he’ll be back?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know.”