The Case of the Careless Kitten

Chapter 15

Houses in the neighborhood were dark and silent as Mason stopped his car at 642½ South Bilvedere. The chill which comes an hour or so before dawn was in the air.

Mason switched off the headlights and ignition and eased the automobile door shut after he and Lunk had alighted at the curb.

“You live in back?” Mason asked.

“Uh huh. That little house around in back. You walk in along the driveway. My place is built onto the garage.”

“You have a car?” Mason asked.

Lunk said, grinning, “Well, it ain’t a car like yours, but it gets me there all right.”

“Keep it here in the garage?”

“Uh huh. I’d’ve taken it to go up to Shore’s place tonight, only I was afraid opening the garage door and starting the car would wake Franklin Shore up. So I sneaked out and took the street car.”

Mason nodded, started walking quietly up the driveway.

“Look here,” Lunk protested, “you ain’t comin’ in.”

“Just far enough to make sure Franklin Shore is still there.”

“You don’t want to wake him up.”

Mason said, “Certainly not. Those flowers will be delivered at almost any time now, and Mrs. Shore may call you up. When she does, you’ll have to talk with her in such a way she’ll know you have a message for her without telling her what it is.”

“Why can’t I tell her over the phone?”

“Because Franklin Shore will wake up when he hears the phone ring and listen to the conversation.”

“Maybe he won’t,” Lunk said. “The phone is right by my bed. I can sort of muffle what I’m saying with a pillow.”

“You might do that,” Mason conceded, all the time walking toward the little bungalow on the back of the lot. “Or, you could just tell her that you’d seen me and that she could get in touch with me, and give her my number.”

“Yes. That might work. What’s your number?”

“I’ll come in and write it out for you,” Mason said.

“You can’t make no noise,” Lunk warned.

“I won’t.”

“Can’t you write it down out here?”

“Not very well.”

“Well, come on in. But don’t make no noise.”

Lunk tiptoed up the two stairs which led to the wooden porch, inserted a key in the lock, and noiselessly opened the door. He switched on a light which illuminated a small room cheaply furnished and bearing unmistakable evidences of masculine occupancy. It seemed even colder inside than it had been out in the air. The house was a flimsy structure, and the chill had penetrated through the walls. The air was impregnated with the odor of stale cigar smoke, and a cigar butt, soggy and cold, was lying on an ash tray.

Mason bent over to look at it. “His?” he asked.

“Yep. Expensive, too, I guess. Smelled good when he was smokin’ it. Pipe and cigarettes are what I smoke.”

Mason continued to lean over the little table on which the ash tray reposed. Directly beside it was a card bearing the printed words, “GEORGE ALBER,” and, in a man’s handwriting, “Called to see about the kitten. Rang the bell, got no answer. Guess everything’s O.K. Knew Helen was worrying.”

Lunk lit a gas heater.

“Nice little place,” Mason said in a low voice.

“Uh huh. Over here’s my bedroom; other bedroom’s in back of that, with a bath between.”

Mason said, “Better close the doors between the bedrooms so Franklin won’t hear the phone ring.”

“That’s a good idea,” Lunk said. “I think the door from the bathroom to the boss’s room was left open. I closed the one from my room.”

He tiptoed into the bedroom, and Mason followed along close behind.

The bedroom was a small, square room, furnished with a cheap bureau, a table, a straight-backed chair, and a single iron bed with a thin mattress and sagging wire springs.

In the light which filtered through from the living room, Mason saw that the door to the bathroom was open, that the bed had not been made, and in the low spot in the center of that bed, lying in the middle of a soiled and crumpled sheet, curled up in a furry ball, was a sleeping kitten.

The drawers of the bureau had been pulled out, the contents dumped on the floor. A clothes closet had been opened and garments pulled out and dropped into a careless pile near the closet door.

Lunk, standing halfway between the door and the bed, looked around him in dazed surprise, and said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!”

Mason walked past Lunk through the open door into the bathroom and looked into the adjoining bedroom.

It was empty.

This bedroom was even smaller than the other. A window in the far side of the bedroom and which looked out on the alley, was standing wide open. A night breeze blew somewhat grimy lace curtains in bellying folds. Covers had been turned back on the spring cot. Clean sheets were slightly rumpled. A pillow case had a depression in it where a man’s head would have rested.

Lunk came to stand beside Mason, looking with open-mouthed dismay at the bed and the window.

“He’s skipped out,” he said ruefully. “If I could’ve got to Matilda Shore while he was still here, she’d have...”

He stopped talking suddenly as though afraid he had said too much.

Mason made a cursory examination of the room. “These bathroom doors open when you left?” he inquired.

“I think this one was, but the one into my room wasn’t. I was very careful to close it when I sneaked out.”

Mason indicated a second door. “Where does this go?”

“Kitchen. And then from the kitchen you can get to the living room.”

“You have to go through one of the bedrooms to get to the bathroom?”

“That’s right. This house is just a square box. The front room an’ kitchen on one side, an’ the two bedrooms on the other, with the bathroom in between the bedrooms.”

Mason said, “I notice this door to the kitchen is open a crack — just an inch or two.”

“Uh huh.”

Mason said, “You can see the kitten walked through that door. There are the tracks of a kitten outlined in something white.”

“That’s right.”

Mason bent over and touched his finger to the floor, rubbing it across one of the white tracks. “Feels something like flour. You can see where the kitten came through the door, walked over toward the bed. Yes, there are four tracks right together where the kitten must have stood to jump up on the bed. Then the kitten came down on the other side. You can see just a trace of the white powder here.”

“That’s right. But I don’t think that powder is flour.”

“Why not?”

“Because I keep my flour in a big tin, and I keep the lid on the tin. And I know the pantry door was closed.”

“Let’s take a look,” Mason said, going into the kitchen.

Lunk opened the door of a little pantry, said, “Of course, I don’t waste a lot of time keeping house. I cook my own grub and my cooking suits me all right. It might not suit some finicky housekeeper, but it suits me. Yep, there’s the cover on the can all right. Of course, I spill a little occasionally when I’m gettin’ it out for cooking. There’s a little on the floor around the can, and it looks like the cat was chasing a mouse or somethin’ an’ jumped right into that pile of stuff. That’s the most careless damn kitten I ever saw in my life. He ain’t got sense enough to be afraid of anything. He’ll run and butt his head up against a wall if he happens to be chasing something, or get on the back of a chair and fall down on his head. He’s just awful careless. Either ain’t got good sense, or don’t know enough to be afraid.”

Mason stood staring down at the flour. “If this pantry door was closed, how did the kitten get in here?”

Lunk thought that over. “Only one answer to that. Franklin was lookin’ for somethin’, an’ he came snooping around in here, an’ the cat followed him.”

Mason said, “How about that stuff in the front bedroom where the drawers have been pulled out and the clothes dumped on the floor?”

Lunk said, somewhat ruefully, “I guess I slipped up. Shore must have got up right after I went out. When he found I was gone, he realized I’d gone out to tell Matilda Shore that he was here. Gosh, why did I let him catch me at that?”

“And then you think he searched the place?” Mason asked.

“He must have, what with him opening the pantry door and all that.”

“What was he looking for?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You must have had something that Franklin Shore wanted.”

Lunk thought for a moment or two, then said, “I’m not certain but what Shore was down on his luck. He may have been looking for money.”

“Did you have any?”

Lunk hesitated, then said, “Yes, I had a little salted away.”

“Where?”

Lunk was silent for eight or ten seconds, and Mason said, “Come on. Come on. I’m not going to hold you up.”

“I kept it in the hip pocket of my best suit, hanging in the closet,” Lunk said.

“Well, let’s look and see if it’s there now.”

Lunk returned to the front room. The kitten opened its sleepy eyes, yawned, got up to its four feet, arched its back as high as it could possibly stretch, then reached out with its forepaws, elevated its hind legs, flexed its back in the other direction, and said, “Miaow.”

Mason laughed. “I think your kitten’s hungry. Have you got any milk in the house?”

Lunk said, “No fresh milk. I got some canned milk. Helen Kendal brought the kitten here so it wouldn’t get no more poison.”

He walked across to the pile of clothes, picked them up, and started going through the pockets. An expression of dismay came over his face.

“Cleaned out!” he muttered. “Damn him, he took every cent I had saved up.”

“Tell me exactly how much it was,” Mason said.

“Pretty close to three hundred dollars. He could get a long ways on that.”

“You think he wants to get away?” Mason asked.

Once more, Lunk’s mouth firmed into a position of sullen silence.

“Think he’ll be back?” Mason asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Have you got any money at all?”

“Some in the bank. I ain’t got no cash.”

“Matilda Shore will be ringing up any minute now,” Mason reminded him. “Are you going to tell her Franklin Shore was here and you let him get away?”

“Good gosh, no!”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about the flowers? How are you going to explain sending her a bunch of hothouse roses with instructions to deliver them immediately — at around three o’clock in the morning?”

Lunk made a frowning effort at thought, then surrendered to say doggedly, “I don’t know what I’m going to tell her — not now.”

“Why tell her anything? Why not simply skip out?”

Lunk said, with feeling, “Gee, I’d like to do that, if I could get away with it?”

“Well, why not? I could take you to a hotel, let you register under an assumed name, and then you could get in touch with Mrs. Shore whenever you wanted to, and make whatever explanations you wanted. In that way, you wouldn’t have to tell anyone anything. You could keep in touch with me.”

Lunk was nodding slowly. “I could stick some stuff in a bag,” he said, “and maybe get a check cashed...”

Mason peeled off a couple of ten-dollar bills from a thick roll.

“You don’t need to cash a check,” he said. “I’ll give you some money, and when you need more, you can telephone me. I’ve given you a number where you can always reach me.”

Lunk suddenly gripped strong fingers around the lawyer’s hand. “You’re acting mighty square,” he said, and, after a moment, added, “You stick by me in this, and I’ll stick by you. And maybe later on, I’ll tell you just what Franklin Shore really wanted. You let me think it over, and I’ll give you a ring later on.”

“Why can’t you tell me now?”

The old sullen look came over Lunk’s face. “Not now,” he said. “I gotta be sure of somethin’ first, but I may tell you later on — maybe around noon. Don’t try to get it out of me now. I’m waiting for somethin’ before I can tell you.”

Mason studied his man. “Is that something,” he asked, “the morning newspaper with the account of Leech’s death?”

Lunk shook his head.

“Or the police report on Matilda Shore’s poisoning?”

“Don’t crowd me. I’m tellin’ you straight,” Lunk warned.

Mason laughed. “All right, come on, I’ll put you in a nice, quiet hotel. Suppose you register as Thomas Trimmer? And I’ll take the kitten along with me and see it’s taken care of.”

Lunk regarded the kitten somewhat wistfully. “You take good care of it.”

“I will,” Mason promised.