face their conditions and adjust to them."
"Do you take it?" Halston asked.
Drogan ignored the question. "It is widely prescribed throughout
the world. It's a synthetic, was developed in the fifties at our New
Jersey labs. Our testing was confined almost solely to cats, because
of the unique quality of the feline nervous system."
"How many did you wipe out?"
Drogan stiffened. "That is an unfair and prejudicial way to put it."
Halston shrugged.
"In the four-year testing period which led to FDA approval of Tri-
Dormal-G, about fifteen thousand cats ... uh, expired."
Halston whistled. About four thousand cats a year. "And now you
think this one's back to get you, huh?"
"I don't feel guilty in the slightest," Drogan said, but that
quavering, petulant note was back in his voice. "Fifteen thousand
test animals died so that hundreds of thousands of human beings -
"
"Never mind that," Halston said. Justifications bored him.
"That cat came here seven months ago. I've never liked cats. Nasty,
disease-bearing animals ... always out in the fields ... crawling
around in barns ... picking up God knows what germs in their fur ...
always trying to bring something with its insides falling out into
the house for you to look at ... it was my sister who wanted to take
it in. She found out. She paid." He looked at the cat sleeping on
Halston's lap with dead hate.
"You said the cat killed three people."
Drogan began to speak. The cat dozed and purred on Halston's lap
under the soft, scratching strokes of Halston's strong and expert
killer's fingers.
Occasionally a pine knot would explode on the hearth, making it
tense like a series of steel springs covered with hide and muscle.
Outside the wind whined around the big stone house far out in the
Connecticut countryside. There was winter in that wind's throat.
The old man's voice droned on and on.
Seven months ago there had been four of them here-Drogan, his
sister Amanda, who at seventy-four was two years Drogan's elder,
her lifelong friend Carolyn Broadmoor ("of the Westchester
Broadmoors," Drogan.said), who was badly afflicted with
emphysema, and Dick Gage, a hired man who had been with the
Drogan family for twenty years. Gage, who was past sixty himself,
drove the big Lincoln Mark IV, cooked, served the evening sherry.
A day maid came in. The four of them had lived this way for
nearly two years, a dull collection of old people and their family
retainer. Their only pleasures were The Hollywood Squares and
waiting to see who would outlive whom.
Then the cat had come.
"It was Gage who saw it first, whining and skulking around the
house. He tried to drive it away He threw sticks and small rocks at
it, and hit it several times. But it wouldn't go. It smelled the food,
of course. It was little more than a bag of bones. People put them
out beside the road to die at the end of the summer season, you
know. A terrible, inhumane thing."
"Better to fry their nerves?" Halston asked.
Drogan ignored that and went on. He hated cats. He always had.
When the cat refused to be driven away, he had instructed Gage to
put out poisoned food. Large, tempting dishes of Calo cat food
spiked with Tri-Dormal-G, as a matter of fact. The cat ignored the
food. At that point Amanda Drogan had noticed the cat and had
insisted they take it in. Drogan had protested vehemently, but
Amanda - had gotten her way. She always did, apparently.
"But she found out," Drogan said. "She brought it inside herself, in
her arms. It was purring, just as it is now. But it wouldn't come
near me. It never has ... yet. She poured it a saucer of milk. 'Oh,
look at the poor thing, it's starving,' she cooed. She and Carolyn
both cooed over it. Disgusting. It was their way of getting back at
me, of course. They knew the way I've felt about felines ever since
the Tri-Dormal-G testing program twenty years ago. They enjoyed
teasing me, baiting me with it." He looked at Halston grimly. "But
they paid."
In mid-May, Gage had gotten up to set breakfast and found
Amanda Drogan lying at the foot of the main stairs in a litter of
broken crockery and Little Friskies. Her eyes bulged sightlessly up
at the ceiling. She had bled a great deal from the mouth and nose.
Her back was broken, both legs were broken, and her neck had
been literally shattered like glass.
"It slept in her room," Drogan said. "She treated it like a baby ...'Is
oo hungwy, darwing? Does oo need to go out and do poopoos!'
Obscene, coming from an old baffle-ax like my sister. I think it
woke her up, meowing. She got his dish. She used to say that Sam
didn't really like his Friskies unless they were wetted down with a
little milk. So she was planning to go downstairs. The cat was
rubbing against her legs. She was old, not too steady on her feet.
Half asleep. They got to the head of the stairs and the cat got in
front of her ... tripped her .. ."
Yes, it could have happened that way, Halston thought. In his
mind's eye he saw the old woman falling forward and outward, too
shocked to scream. The Friskies spraying out as she tumbled head
over heels to the bottom, the bowl smashing. At last she comes to
rest at the bottom, the old bones shattered, the eyes glaring, the
nose and ears trickling blood. And the purring cat begins to work
its way down the stairs, contentedly munching Little Friskies ...
"What did the coroner say?" he asked Drogan. "Death by accident,
of course. But I knew."
"Why didn't you get rid of the cat then? With Amanda gone?"
Because Carolyn Broadmoor had threatened to leave if he did,
apparently. She was hysterical, obsessed with the subject. She was
a sick woman, and she was nutty on the subject of spiritualism. A
Hartford medium had told her (for a mere twenty dollars) that
Amanda's soul had entered Sam's feline body. Sam had been
Amanda's, she told Drogan, and if Sam went, she went.
Halston, who had become something of an expert at reading
between the lines of human lives, suspected that Drogan and the
old Broadmoor bird had been lovers long ago, and the old dude
was reluctant to let her go over a cat.
"It would have been the same as suicide," Drogan said. "In her
mind she was still a wealthy woman, perfectly capable of packing
up that cat and going to New York or London or even Monte Carlo
with it. In fact she was the last of a great family, living on a
pittance as a result of a number of bad investments in the sixties.
She lived on the second floor here in a specially controlled,
superhumidified room. The woman was seventy, Mr. Halston. She
was a heavy smoker until the last two years of her life, and the
emphysema was very bad. I wanted her here, and if the cat had to
stay ..."
Halston nodded and then glanced meaningfully at his watch.
"Near the end of June, she died in the night. The doctor seemed to
take it as a matter of course ... just came and wrote out the death
certificate and that was the end of it. But the cat was in the room.
Gage told me."
"We all have to go sometime, man," Halston said.
"Of course. That's what the doctor said. But I knew. I remembered.
Cats like to get babies and old people when they're asleep. And
steal their breath."
"An old wives' tale."
"Based on fact, like most so-called old wives' tales," Drogan
replied.
"Cats like to knead soft things with their paws, you see. A pillow, a
thick shag rug... or a blanket. A crib blanket or an old person's