A sound woke me—the sound of a window opening slowly.
Chapter V
Death to Rats
WITH ME, as with most people, dreams are forgotten within the first few seconds after waking. I remember the one I was just having, though, because of the tie-up it had with the sound that wakened me.
My dream had changed that slow upward scrape of the window into the scrape of claws on cement, the cement of the basement. There in the little front room of the basement, Dr. Roth was standing with his hand on the latch of a rat cage, and a monstrous cat with the markings of a Siamese was scraping her claws on the floor, gathering her feet under her to spring. It was Beautiful, my cat, and yet it wasn’t. She was almost as large as a lion. Her eyes glowed like the headlights of a car.
Dr. Roth cowered back against the tier of rat cages, holding a hand in front of him to ward off the attack. I watched from the doorway, and I tried to open my mouth to scream at her to stop, not to jump. But I seemed paralyzed. I couldn’t move a muscle or make a sound.
I saw the cat’s tail grow larger. Her eyes seemed to shoot blue sparks. And then she leaped.
Dr. Roth’s arm was knocked aside as though it had been a toothpick. Her claws sank into his shoulders and her white, sharp teeth found his throat. He screamed once, and then the scream became a gurgle and he lay on the cement floor, dead, in a puddle of his blood. And the cat, backing away from him, was shrinking to her real size, getting smaller, her claws still scraping the cement as she backed away…
And then, still frozen with the horror of that dream, I began to know that I was dreaming, that the sound I heard was the opening of a window.
I sat up in bed, fast. I opened my mouth to yell for Jack. Someone stood there, just inside the window!
And then, before I had yelled, I saw that it was Jack who stood there. Enough light came in from the other room that I could be sure of that. He’d raised the shade. He was crouched down now, and his eyes, level with the middle of the lower pane, stared through it into the night outside.
He must have heard the springs creak as I sat up. He turned. “Shhh,” he said. “It’s all right—I think.”
He put the window back down again then, and threw over the lock. He pulled down the shade and came over to the bed and sat down in a chair beside it.
“Sorry I woke you,” he said, very quietly. “Can you go back to sleep, or do you want to talk a while?”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Three-forty. You were asleep only half an hour. I’m sorry, but—”
“But what? What’s been happening? Did you think you heard a sound outside?”
“Not outside the window, no. But a few minutes ago I thought I heard someone try the knob of the hall door. But when I got there and listened, I couldn’t hear anything.”
“It could have been Alister Cole,” I said, “if he got in the back way. Wheeler isn’t watching the back door.”
“That’s what I thought, even though I didn’t hear anything back there. So I went to the window. I thought if I could attract Wheeler’s attention, he’d come in the front way. Then I’d take a chance opening the hall door—with my gun ready, of course. If Cole was there, we’d have him between us.”
“Did you get Wheeler’s attention?”
He shook his head slowly. “His car isn’t where it was. You can’t even see it from the window. Maybe he moved it to a different spot where he thought he’d be less conspicuous, or could watch better.”
“That’s probably it. Well, what are you going to do?”
“Nothing. Sit tight. If I stick my neck out into that hall, or go outside through the window, the edge is going to be with Cole. If I sit here and make him come to me, it’s the other way round. Only I’m through reading for tonight. I’m sitting right here by the bed. If you can sleep, go ahead. I’ll shut up and let you.”
“Sure,” I said. “I can sleep swell. Just like a lamb staked out in the jungle to draw a tiger for the hunters. That’s how I can sleep.”
He chuckled. “The lamb doesn’t know what it’s there for.”
“Until it smells tiger. I smell tiger.” That reminded me of my dream, and I told him about it.
“You’re a psychologist,” he said. “What does it mean?”
“Probably that I had a subconscious dislike for Dr. Roth,” I told him. “Only I know that already. I don’t need to interpret a dream to tell me that.”
“What did you have against Roth, Brian? I’ve known there was something from the way you’ve talked about him.”
“He was a prig, for one thing,” I said. “You know me well enough, Jack, to know I’m not too bad a guy, but he thought I was miles away from being good enough for Jeanette. Well—maybe I am, but then again, so’s everybody else who might fall in love with her.”
“Does she love you?”
“I think so.” I thought it over. “Sure, I practically know she does, from things she said tonight.”
“Anything else? I mean, about Roth. Is that the only reason you didn’t like him?”
I didn’t say anything for a while. I was thinking. I thought, why not tell Jack now? Sooner or later, he’ll know it. The whole world will know it. Why not get it off my chest right now, while there was a good chance to get my side of it straight?
Something made me stop and listen first. There wasn’t a sound from outside nor from the hallway.
“Jack,” I said, “I’m going to tell you something. I’m awfully glad that you were here tonight.”
“Thanks, pal.” He chuckled a little.
“I don’t mean what you think I mean, Jack. Sure, maybe you saved my life from Alister Cole. But more than that, you gave me an alibi.”
“An alibi? For killing Roth? Sure, I was with you when he was killed.”
“Exactly. Listen, Jack, I had a reason for killing Roth. That reason’s coming out later anyway. I might as well tell you now.”
He turned and stared at me. There was enough light in the room so that I could see the movement of his head, but, not enough so that he could watch my face. I don’t know why he bothered turning.
“If you need an alibi,” he said, “you’ve sure got one. We started playing chess at somewhere around eight. You haven’t been out of my sight since then, except while you were in Chief Randall’s office.”
“Don’t think I don’t know that,” I told him. “And don’t think I’m not happy about it. Listen, Jack. Because Roth is dead, I’m going to be a millionaire. If he was alive, I still might be, but there’d have been a legal fight about it. I would have been right, but I could have lost just the same.”
“You mean it would have been a case of your word against his?”
“Exactly. And he’s—he was—department head, and I’m only a flunky, a little better on his social scale than Alister Cole. And it’s something big, Jack. Really big.”
“What?”
“What kind of rat cages did you find in the basement when you looked down there?” I asked him.
“What kind? I don’t get you. I don’t know makes of rat cages.”
“Don’t worry about the make,” I said. “You found only one kind. Empty ones. The rats were dead. And disposed of.”
He turned to look at me again. “Go on,” he said.
Now that I’d started to tell him, I knew I wouldn’t even try to go back to sleep. I was too excited. I propped the pillow up against the head of the bed.
“Make a guess, Jack,” I said. “How much food do rats eat a year in the United States alone?”
“I wouldn’t know. A million dollars’ worth?”
“A hundred million dollars’ worth,” I said, “at a conservative estimate. Probably more than a million dollars is spent fighting them, each year. In the world, their cost is probably a billion dollars a year. Not altogether—just for one year! How much do you think something would be worth that would actually completely eliminate rats—both Mus Rattus and Mus Norvegicus—completely and once and for all? Something that would put them with the hairy mammoth and the roc and the dinosaurs?”