The Dishonest Murderer Page 23

  Watching Mr. Halder prepare the food, one might have thought him over-fussy about it, and indeed, the animals in the main room seemed to feel this and made audible protests, having recognized the clunk of the closing refrigerator door. Hurry, the dogs told him; hurry, we are starving. What are you doing out there? the young Siamese demanded, abrupt and harsh. The small black cat, high-voiced, was plaintive, and almost drowned out. Even some canaries, although not immediately concerned, piped small remarks. But Mr. Halder, working under a bright light which threw the remainder of his living quarters into shadow, heating milk for the youngest kittens, ground meat for the other cats, prepared food for the dogs, did not hurry. He washed the feeding dishes meticulously, measured food into them with precision; might, for the care he expended, the scrupulous cleanliness he exercised, have been preparing food in the diet kitchen of some most modern hospital. He would not, as old Felix often told him, go to half so much trouble for himself. But that was so obvious that Mr. Halder did not bother to think about it and was surprised to hear it mentioned, even by old Felix.

  He took milk to the smallest kittens first; took milk warmed, in a broad, flat pan. The kittens were standing, wobbling slightly, making small sounds. He put the pan down carefully in the center of their pen and, when all of them tried to eat at the same segment of the pan’s circumference, rearranged them with gentle care. The kittens made strange, bobbing motions at the milk, now and then putting up small, surprised heads and sneezing as milk entered their noses. But the progress generally was encouraging; watching them for a moment, Mr. Halder speculated as to where he would find homes for them, feeling that their chances of growing up were improving. He smiled down at the kittens and went back to get the sick boxer’s broth. She lapped at it with little interest and then went again to the rear of her pen and lay down, now on her side. Mr. Halder shook his head and made sad sounds with tongue and teeth.

  He fed the Siamese, the dachshunds and the excited cockers; he presented meat to the small black cat, who crouched in front of it, looked in all directions, waved her plumy tail, abandoned the dish to go to the window and survey the visible terrain for enemies and, returning to the dish, finally ate. Mr. Halder then collected the used dishes, beginning with that of the five small kittens, and washed them in very hot water. The black cat had finished by then, and Mr. Halder lifted her from her pen and carried her into the back room, switching off as he went all but a single dim bulb in the shop room. In his living quarters, Mr. Halder sat in a chair with the little black cat on his knee and began slowly, gently, to brush her long fur. The cat purred and Mr. Halder looked as if he would have purred if he could have.

  He had almost finished when the bell rang. The cat jumped on his knee and put in her claws for stability and, if necessary, for a leaping start. Mr. Halder soothed her, but swore softly to himself. He carried the cat back through the shop, turning on the lights as he passed through it, and put her back in her window pen. Then he went to the door and looked out. He started to shake his head and then saw who it was. He swore again, under his breath, but partially opened the door.

  “So it’s you,” he said. This did not appear to require an answer, and the visitor made none. “I should have expected it,” Mr. Halder said, and there was a kind of contempt in his voice. “It won’t do any good, you know.” There was no response to this, either, and Mr. Halder did not seem to expect one. “Well,” he said, “come in. What are you waiting for?”

  The visitor went in.

  2

  Tuesday, 2 P.M. to 4:25 P.M.

  The trouble with the cat they called Gin was that, although she obligingly assumed all the characteristic positions, she remained in none of them. That was, of course, usually the trouble with cats; it was one of the things which made them so hard to do, but at the same time so much fun to try to do. “Gin!” Liza O’Brien said suddenly, her voice soft but insistent. Gin sat, looked at her and pricked up dark ears. Quickly, almost frantically, Liza O’Brien’s pencil moved on her drawing pad. Gin stood up and came to help. “No,” Liza said. “Oh, damn you, Gin!” Gin rubbed against the girl; Gin scratched her chin on a corner of the drawing pad; Gin purred furiously, charmed by the words of approval and affection. Liza sketched for a moment longer, from memory.

  The sheet on which she was working was covered already with fragments of the cat they called Gin—of Gin stretching, Gin scratching herself; one priceless one of Gin sitting straight up, like a rabbit, batting at something over her head which only Gin could see. All that morning, Liza had been making such quick, tantalizing sketches of the cat they called Gin; most of the evening before she had worked on the one they called Sherry. (The one they called Martini was still under a table, all round blue eyes and suspicion. But there was one rather promising picture note on blue eyes and suspicion.) Gin was much the hardest of the three, and on the whole the most fun. By using Gin’s long body and pointed face, Martini’s enormous eyes, by trying to add to them the evasive wistfulness of the one they called Sherry, she might have the composite they wanted. It would be wonderful if she did; it would be wonderful if, tonight at dinner, she could tell Brian that she had it—that really she was certain she had it, that it was going to come off. It was wonderful to have nice things to tell Brian.

  Gin, ignored, left in disgust. She went to a chair, reared up to it, sank her claws in, and began to scratch with the full, lithe strength of her muscled body. The slip cover shredded satisfactorily and Gin, encouraged, took a new hold. Liza O’Brien, her dark hair falling about her face, leaned over the pad and sketched furiously. That, certainly, was characteristic; if she could only get that! A cat scratching her owner’s slip covers was almost at her best; you got the muscles, then; could show them under the misleading softness, the encompassing fur, which was all so many cat artists seemed to get—softness and charm.

  “Not that,” Gerald North told her the Friday before, when he had told her to try it. “Not just the fluff of cat. You know what I mean? This—” he had waved at the drawings she had brought in to show him—“this makes me think you do. But they all tell me it’s difficult.”

  She had known what he meant; she had said she would love to have a shot at it.

  They had talked terms, then, and Gerald North had admitted they could not be generous. Not this time. Some day, he said, and was perhaps talking more to himself than to the slender young woman who sat in the chair beside his desk, he would really do a book. But this couldn’t be it; this time, the costs mattered.

  Terms didn’t matter, she told him; it was grand to have a shot at it. She had been told to thank Dorian Weigand for that, and had said she did; had said indeed she did. And then Gerald North had said that he supposed she had cats, or could get at cats.

  “I’ll find them,” she said. “I know where—”

  “If you like,” Gerald North said, “you can use ours, for Siamese. Not that they’re show cats. Still—” He paused. “God knows,” he said, with sudden feeling, “they do everything cats do.” He sighed. “At least,” he added. “Sometimes I think—” He did not finish the sentence.

  And so Liza O’Brien sat on the edge of a chair in the Norths’ living room, bent over a drawing pad with her hair falling around her face and tried to get down enough of Gin to go on with. Gin finished the slip cover, for the moment; sat briefly in thought, uttered a deep, apparently angry, cry, and dashed across the room to claw her way enthusiastically up the curtains. Halfway up, she paused, clinging to the damask, and looked back over her shoulder to see whether she was being observed and admired. “Wonderful, Gin,” the girl said, and started a new drawing as rapidly as she could. If she could only get the shoulder muscles, the cat’s indescribable twisted neck, the cat’s excited eyes; a hint of all that, in half a dozen sure lines! All she needed, she thought as her pencil moved, was a miracle.

  Then, before the girl heard anything, Gin spoke sharply, on a different note, and began to come down the curtain, swinging perilously from hold to hold, evid
ently in a great hurry about something. Sherry appeared, loping, from another room; Martini, with a side-long glance at Liza, emerged from beneath the table. All three cats gathered at the door to the outer hall. They looked at it intently as a key rubbed metallically in the lock. Then they looked up, higher than the sound and Sherry, whose voice was lighter than that of the other cats, as her coloring was, spoke in a drawn-out tone of ineffable longing. The door opened and Pamela North came in.

  “I had the most interesting taxi driver,” Pam said. “Nice Gin, nice Sherry, nice Teeney. Nice babies.” She crouched to the cat level and began to stroke. Gin arrived first, purring loudly, and was assured that she was the nicest cat. Sherry floated in reach, was touched, floated out again in a curve. Teeney spoke in a scolding tone. “The main cat,” Mrs. North said. “The principal cat.” Teeney said, “Yah!”

  “Jealous,” Pam North said. “The others first always makes her. But the others came first. He said he’d picked up a couple he didn’t think had stopped drinking since the night before and that he drove them to pick up her husband to explain why she hadn’t been home. He was in a bar and when he got in the cab they had a bottle and everybody had a drink, although the taxi driver said all he wanted was to get them out before the shooting started. Nice Teeney, is the major cat.”

  “Oh,” Liza O’Brien said.

  “But they just went to another bar and all got out,” Pam said. “An anti-climax, but still interesting. Of course, with taxi drivers, you never—Did you make out all right? They behave at all?”

  “Bits and pieces,” Liza O’Brien said. “Want to look?”

  Pam looked. Several times, studying the small sketches—all line; all cat—she laughed. She pointed at the one of Gin sitting high, like a rabbit. “The only one I ever knew who did,” she said. “Except in tall grass, of course. To see over it. Gin just likes it. Pretends there’s something up there. These are perfect, you know. If I were Jerry—”

  “I hope,” Liza said. “It’s swell of Mr. North to give me a chance.”

  “He likes the book,” Pam said. “He liked the things of yours Dorian showed him. So why not?”

  Liza flipped the rolled back pages flat on the pad; found brown paper and string in the chair behind her; wrapped up the drawing pad with the assistance of Gin and Sherry. She said she might want to come back, but for the moment she had enough to go on with. She said it was wonderful of Mrs. North—

  “Nonsense,” Pam said. “Does the cats honor. You’ve got long hairs? I’d think they’d be harder. I mean, so much fur.”

  “They’re easy to make pretty,” Liza said. “Hard to make real. Yes, I know where a fine black kitten is.”

  Liza left the Norths’ apartment then, walked a few blocks to have a sandwich at Bigelow’s and then walked some further blocks. She was a small girl, and the drawing pad was large; people she passed turned back to look at her and smiled with a kind of contentment, as if something pleasant had just been proved. Liza found West Kepp Street with no difficulty, having been there before; she walked along it to J. K. Halder’s shop, and down the steps to the door of the shop. She paused, then, before she touched the door, and tapped her fingers lightly on the windowpane. The black kitten rose on hind legs and boxed with the fingers through the glass. Liza turned away and pushed at the door. The door did not open.

  This was surprising. “Any time during the afternoon,” the old man had said. “We’re always here.” But now it appeared he was not there.

  “Well!” Liza said, and pushed at the door again, and again without result. I could have stayed and had another shot at the Norths’ major cat, she thought. But Mr. Halder had seemed so cooperative, after she had shown him one or two sketches. “You like animals,” he had told her, and she had said, “Of course.”

  “No of course about it,” Mr. Halder had told her then, this the Saturday before. “Most of the people I know—” He had broken off, and there had been a look of dislike on his face; it was as if she had annoyed him. But then his face cleared. “Nothing to worry your head about,” he said. He smiled at her.

  But that—that sudden look of displeasure, almost of anger on his face—had for some reason prevented her from saying what she had planned to say, from explaining how she had happened to find a black longhaired cat in this particular, so securely hidden, shop in this secretive street. It could come out later; perhaps while she was sketching. “By the way,” she could say, and she had planned the words in her mind, “by the way, I didn’t just happen to come here. You see—” This decision to postpone had been made intuitively, with the idea that it might be better if he knew her first, approved of her, as herself. So arranged, it would seem unarranged, or she had hoped it would. But at the same time she was puzzled why it should be so important, why either arrangement or the absence of arrangement mattered. She supposed she was merely self-conscious about Mr. Halder, of whom she had heard a little, all of which had made him sound difficult.

  She pushed at the door again and then looked into the shop. It was only dimly lighted; one hanging bulb, deep in the room, seemed to create rather than to disperse shadows. Then she saw why this was: the light was screened so that glare from it would not fall into the pens along the wall. But now, she thought, it’s the middle of the afternoon. It’s as if—

  “Nonsense,” a sharp voice said behind her. “Of course it’ll open. Get out of the way.”

  She turned quickly, emerging from the preoccupation of her thoughts. A man was standing on the lowest step of the three leading down to the door level. Even so, her eyes were almost on a level with his; why, she thought, he’s the smallest man. He was also, she thought next, one of the oldest men; he had a little, amazingly wrinkled face and very sharp blue eyes. The eyes stabbed at her, suspiciously, almost angrily.

  “Women!” the little man said, and came down the last step. Now he was appreciably less tall than she, which meant he was under five feet. “Why should it be locked?” he demanded, looking up at her, somehow implying that she was attempting to deceive him.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It just seems to be.”

  “Crazy old fool,” the little man said. “Afraid somebody’ll want to buy one.” He paused a moment. “You want to buy one?” he demanded.

  “No,” she said. “I—I just want to see Mr. Halder. But apparently he isn’t here.”

  “Here?” the man said. “Nonsense, girl. Of course he’s here. Where would he be?”

  “Look,” Liza O’Brien said, trying somehow to bridge a gap which must, she thought, have a width of more than fifty years. “I hardly know Mr. Halder. But he told me I could come around.” The sharp blue eyes continued to bore at her. “To sketch a cat,” she said, and for some reason almost added, “please.”

  “Absurd,” the old man said. “Get out of the way.”

  She moved aside. The little old man pushed at the door. When it did not open he turned the knob and then, angrily, shook it. Then he turned to her. “Well,” he said. “He’s a crazy old fool. Tell him so to his face.”

  There did not seem to be an answer to this.

  “Want to sketch a cat?” the old man said. “Why?”

  “For a book,” she said. “A book about them.”

  “Books!” he said. “Nonsense. Ever hear of chess?”

  “Yes,” the girl said. She felt a little as if she were swimming under water.

  “You’re a pretty thing,” he said, next. “Waste your time with books. Sketching cats. No boy?”

  “Please,” Liza said, surfacing. “Mr. Halder isn’t in, obviously. It’s very nice of you to be so interested, but I’ll just—”

  “Nonsense,” the old man said. “Let you in. Not going to poison the animals, are you? Anyway—”

  This time he did not finish. He began to slap the pockets of his dark suit. He found what he wanted and pulled a key from one of the pockets. He unlocked the door and at once went in.

  “Well,” he said, over his shoulder and without stopp
ing, “come on in. What’re you waiting for, girl?”

  Liza O’Brien went in. The little old man was somewhere in the shadows; then lights came on. He came back to her, looked a little up at her and, suddenly, smiled.

  “An old man, girl,” he said. “Old enough for your grandfather. Great-grandfather. Don’t mind me. Where is the old fool?”

  He looked into the pen which was the home of the black kitten, almost as if he expected to find Mr. Halder sharing the pen. “Where is he, Electra?” he said, in a quite matter-of-fact voice. “Where’s the old man? Sleeping it off?”

  The little cat looked up at him, opened her pink mouth widely, made a very small sound. The cockers in the next pen began to clamor loudly. The little man listened, moved in front of their pen, and looked at them.

  “You’ve got no water,” the man said. He spoke almost accusingly, as if it were a fault of the cockers. They spoke together, in a frenzy of assent.

  The little man turned sharply to Liza O’Brien.

  “Something’s the matter,” he said. “They haven’t got water.”

  He turned again and began to walk rapidly down the room toward a door at the end. He walked so rapidly it was almost as if he trotted.

  The room in which Mr. Halder lived was empty. The bed had been made up, rather sketchily, since it was last slept in. The little old man went to shelves by a refrigerator and looked at the dishes on them. The dishes shone.

  Liza had gone to the door, had stood in it watching the little old man. Now, as he turned and started toward her, she moved aside to let him pass. All the wrinkles on the little face seemed even deeper than before; she saw that he was very disturbed, perhaps even frightened.

  “J. K.!” he called into the shop, in a high, ancient voice. “J. K.!”

  There was no answer. It took them only a few minutes to find out why. Mr. Halder, dressed in black and white, folded so that his knees were against his chest, lying on his side, was in one of the pens. A young boxer in the next pen was as far from him as she could get; she was curled up and she was shivering.