“Damn it,” Willie said. “Listen, the reason I’m in a hurry for that package is that one tube in it, a kind I didn’t have in stock, is for Dolf Marsh’s T.V. set. I’ve put a lot of work in it already but I can’t finish it without that one tube. I’ll get twenty bucks for the job—put in plenty of time on it—and he pays cash on the barrelhead, so I won’t have to wait. But I’ve got only three dollars and some change in cash. If you can lend me the difference—out of your pocket, not putting it on the bill—I’ll pay you the minute Dolf pays me.”
“Well—this one time, Willie. But like you said, in cash and you pay me when Dolf pays you.”
“Thanks a lot, Cap. Seeing you.”
Willie took his coat and hat from a hook on the wall, went to the door and turned. “Cat,” he said, “you keep shop while I’m gone. I won’t bother locking up, nothing worth stealing. If anyone comes in—but nobody will—tell ’em to wait, that I’ll be right back.”
He opened the door and then turned back again. “Cat,” he said, “let’s get one thing straight. You’re welcome to stay here till it’s through raining and till you’re fully dry. But I can’t keep you. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I can’t afford to keep a cat, here or at home. If you heard that phone conversation, you know how broke I am. I hope you got a home to go back to, because I wouldn’t keep a cat unless I could feed it right—cat food and milk. And while that wouldn’t run much, not much is too much in my case, right now and for maybe a long time to come.”
The cat didn’t answer and Willie went out and closed the door behind him. He ran to the general store and post office and, after getting his package, ran back again. He kept close to the buildings and didn’t get wet enough for the rain to have soaked through his coat. He hung the coat and his hat up again and then went to his workbench to open the package.
The cat had been up on the bench and had jumped down when he opened the door. Now, in the thin film of dust which covered most of the bench he saw tracks which showed that it had wandered about quite a bit up there. It had apparently examined and sniffed at two television-set chassis—the one he was going to work on now that he had the needed vacuum tube; and another that needed a new picture tube for which he had also sent away. And the cat had apparently examined various odd parts and tools that had been lying loose.
Also there had been a loose-leaf handbook of circuits lying open at the back of the bench; and now it was open at a different page than the one he remembered. He said, “Cat, you been studying electronics?” and grinned down at it, amused at the thought. He’d thought he’d left the book open at the circuit for Dolf Marsh’s set, but he must have been wrong about that.
He opened the package, threw the cardboard away, and put the various small items of its contents where they belonged, keeping out the tube for Dolf’s set and pulling its chassis along the bench in front of him.
He patted the edge of the bench invitingly and said, “Come on, jump up again and watch me work. I don’t mind teaching you electronics, except I don’t know too much about it myself. Not the theory of it, that is. I just had a four months course. I can follow a circuit all right, but I don’t know why it works any more than you do. But come on up.”
He patted the edge of the workbench again and this time the cat jumped up. It sat still, curled up and watching him with the intentness and alertness with which only a cat can watch something.
He was lonesome and he talked to it while he worked. He seemed to feel its sympathy, or thought he did, when, after he had replaced the faulty tube and plugged in the set, he found that it still didn’t work properly. He told the cat what he was doing while he checked condensers and capacitances, and looked for loose connections.
And then, having found the perfect audience, he found himself telling it his personal problems, his worries about the shop and whether he could keep it going, his worries about his mother, about his doubtful future. He could relieve his mind, he found, by telling the cat things he couldn’t possibly tell to any human being; not to his mother, because they would cause her more worry and grief than she already had; not to anyone else, because to no one else could he admit how hopeless his prospects looked to him—let alone how much he wanted to get married, but couldn’t see even dating a girl, under the circumstances. Even taking one to a movie would have taken money he could not afford from his slim budget.
The cat was a good listener. When finally it jumped down from the bench and ran to the door, where it miaouwed and pawed at the glass, he walked to the door reluctantly to let it out.
“Cat,” he said. “Come back any time. Same window, same signal. I’ll share my lunch with you if I can’t do anything more.”
The rain had stopped. He watched the cat through the glass of the door as it ran across the street and disappeared into an areaway.
Obviously it had a home somewhere. But, he thought, someday he’d have to get a cat of his own. It couldn’t cost him much to feed one, and it would be the first extravagance he’d allow himself, if and when the pressure on him ever eased off a little.
He never knew, never suspected, that he had just been judged and found wanting; that he had been spared an experience which would have led soon to an early death.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Doc Staunton had spent the morning making voluminous notes on the two human suicides and the phenomena which seemed to have accompanied them—at least in regard to time and place, if no other connection could be traced. But he wanted more than notes; while statements at the inquest and conversations, especially the ones at the Gross farm, were so fresh in his mind he wanted them down on paper, as nearly verbatim as he could get them down.
But getting everything down, he realized, was going to be one hell of a job, especially as he didn’t have a typewriter with him and was only a mediocre typist in any case. He spent half an hour writing in longhand and had only three pages, giving a detailed description of the manner of death of the dog and just a start into the inquest testimony of Charlotte Garner, when he began to get writer’s cramp. It was going to take him thirty to fifty pages, he realized, to get all the facts down in detail, let alone his deductions, his mental processes which refused to permit him to accept the allied phenomena—the apparently suicidal animal deaths and the missing soup stock and gravy from Mrs. Gross’s kitchen—as simply isolated and coincidental happenings having nothing to do with the human deaths. It would be almost as bad as writing a book in longhand.
But it had to be put down, somehow, while it was fresh in his mind. He considered going into Green Bay to try to rent a tape recorder, or to buy one if he couldn’t rent one. But he hated the things, mostly because he liked to be able to pace while he dictated. And in any case he’d have to hire someone to transcribe the tapes, so it would be better to find a stenographer who could take his dictation in shorthand and transcribe it.
Probably he’d have to find someone in Green Bay, but he’d try Bartlesville first on his way through it.
The editor of the Clarion, Bartlesville’s weekly newspaper, would be his best source of information. And Doc knew him because by now he’d played in two poker games with him. Yes, Ed Hollis would be the best person to ask. He might even know someone in Wilcox, which was a little bigger than Bartlesville and only about half as far as Green Bay.
Hollis was pounding an ancient Underwood when Doc walked in just before noon. He said, “Just a second, Doc,” and finished a sentence before he looked up. “What gives? And are you playing in the game tonight? Hans just phoned me that there’s one on—and there’s no way of reaching you by phone. Lucky you dropped in, if you want to take some more of our money.”