I took over. “We haven’t called copper on the bigamy bit, either, because you’re not going to prosecute her for it, or tell the cops. We figure you owe her something for having tried to frame her on a murder charge. We’ve talked to her. She’ll leave town quietly, and go to Reno, and in a little while you can let out that you’re divorced and free. And marry Dorothy and legitimize Jerry.
“She really will be getting a divorce, incidentally, but from Littleton, not from you. I said you’d finance that and give her a reasonable stake to start out with. Like ten thousand dollars—does that sound reasonable?”
He nodded. His face looked less drawn, less gray now. I had a hunch his improvement would be a lot faster now.
“And you fellows,” he said. “How can I ever—?”
“We’re even,” Uncle Am said. “Your retainer will cover. But don’t ever look us up again to do a job for you. A private detective doesn’t like to be made a patsy, be put in the spot of helping a frame-up. And that’s what you tried to do to us. Don’t ever look us up again.”
We never saw Ollie again, but we did hear from him once, a few months later. One morning, a Western Union messenger came into our office to deliver a note and a little box. He said he had instructions not to wait and left.
The envelope contained a wedding announcement. One of the after-the-fact kind, not an invitation, of the marriage of Oliver R. Bookman to Dorothy Stark. On the back of it was scribbled a note. “Hope you’ve forgiven me enough to accept a wedding present in reverse. I’ve arranged for the dealer to leave it out front. Papers will be in glove compartment. Thanks for everything, including accepting this.” And the little box, of course, contained two sets of car keys.
It was, as I’d known it would be, a brand-new Buick sedan, gray, a hell of a car. We stood looking at it, and Uncle Am said, “Well, Ed, have we forgiven him enough?”
“I guess so,” I said. “It’s a sweet chariot. But somebody got off on his time, either the car dealer or the messenger, and it’s been here too long. Look.”
I pointed to the parking ticket on the windshield. “Well, shall we take our first ride in it, down to the City Hall to pay the fine and get right with God?”
We did.
A Cat Walks
IT ALL started with one cat, one small gray cat. It ended with nine of them. Gray cats all—because at night all cats are gray—and some of them were alive and others dead. And there was a man without a face, but the cats didn’t do that.
It started at ten o’clock in the morning. Miss Weyburn must have been waiting for the shop to open, because she came in as soon as I’d put up the shades and unlocked the door. I knew her name was Miss Weyburn because she’d given it to me three days before when she’d come in to leave her cat with us. And she was such a honey that I remembered her name almost as well as I remembered my own or that of the shop. Incidentally, it’s the Bon Ton Pet Shop, and I think it’s a silly name myself, but my mother has a half interest in it, and you know how women are. It was all I could do to keep it from being a pet shoppe, and to avoid that I settled for the Bon Ton part with scarcely more of a murmur than would have caused the neighbors to send in a riot call.
I smiled at her and said, “Good morning, Miss Weyburn.”
She had one of our business cards in her hand and said, “Good morning, Mr.—”
She sort of glanced at the card, so I put in quickly: “Don’t let the name on the card fool you; I’m not Bon Ton. The name is Phil Evans. Very much at your service. And I hope that—”
“I came to get my cat, please.”
I nodded, and stalled. “I remember; you left a cat to be boarded while you were out of town, didn’t you? I’m very fond of cats, myself. So many people prefer dogs, but there’s something about a cat—a kind of quiet dignity and self-respect. Dogs seem to lack it. They’re boisterous and haven’t any subtlety. They—”
“I would like,” she said firmly, “to have my cat. Now. To take out.”
“Yes, ma’am; with or without mustar— Now, don’t get mad! Please. I’ll get it. Let’s see; it was a small gray cat, I recall. I presume you want the same one. What is its name?”
And then the way she was looking at me made me decide that I’d better get it for her right away and try to resume the conversation afterward. So I went to the back room where we keep most of the pets, and went to the cage where Miss Weyburn’s cat had been.
The cage was empty. The door was closed and latched, so it couldn’t have got out by itself. But it wasn’t there.
Incredulously, I opened the door of the cage to look in; which was silly, because I could see through the netting perfectly well that the cage was empty.
And so were the cages on either side. In fact, Miaow Alley—the row of cat cages—was a deserted street. There weren’t any cats. Neither Miss Weyburn’s nor the four other cats, our own cats, which had been there yesterday.
I looked around the room quickly, but everything else was O.K. I mean, all the dogs were there, and the canaries chirping as usual, and the big parrot that we have to keep out of sight in the back room until he’s forgotten a few of the words somebody taught him.
But there weren’t any cats.
I was too surprised, just then, to be worried. I went to the staircase between the back room and the store, and yelled up, “Hey, ma!” and she came to the head of the stairs.
The girl up front said, “Is something wrong with Cinder, Mr… uh…Evans?”
I smiled at her reassuringly, or tried to. I said, “Not at all. I…I just don’t know which cage my mother put him in.”
Ma was coming down the stairs and I said to her, “Listen, ma, when you fed the cats this morning, did you—”
“Cats? Why, Phil, there aren’t any cats. I told you at breakfast, while you were reading that paper, that you’d have to arrange to get some. Weren’t you even listening?”
“But, ma! That little gray cat! It wasn’t ours; surely you didn’t—”
“Not ours? Why, I thought you told me—”
By that time she was in the store, and she caught the stricken look on Miss Weyburn’s face, and got the idea. Meanwhile, I was deciding that I’d never again read at the table while ma was talking to me and sometimes answer “Uh-huh” without being sure what she was saying. But that good resolution wasn’t doing any good right at the moment.
Our customer was getting white around the gills and red around the eyes, and her voice sounded like she was trying to keep from crying and wouldn’t succeed much longer. She said, “But how could you have—” And she was looking at me, and I had to stand there and look back because there wasn’t any mouse hole around for me to crawl into.
I gulped. “Miss Weyburn, it looks like we’ve…I’ve pulled an awful boner. But we’ll find that cat and get it back for you. Somehow. Ma, do you know who you sold it to? Was there a sales slip or anything?”
Ma shook her head slowly. “No, the man paid cash. For all of them. And he was such an odd-looking—”
“All of them?” I echoed. “You mean one guy bought all our cats?”
“Yes, Phil. I told you, at breakfast. It was late yesterday afternoon, after you left at four o’clock. You got home so late last night that I didn’t have a chance to tell you until—”