“Just a little case I’m winding up,” Henry chuckled. “Queer old chap with a lot of money who’s been haunted by cats. Been following a catnip trail all day, cap, but I’ve got it all straight and figured out now. I guess Matthew Stuyvesant won’t be bothered by any more feline ghosts in his house.”
“Matthew Stuyvesant?” De Kane barked. He stopped short to glare at Henry, still puffing hard from his hurry.
“Yes, you know him?”
“Stuyvesant!” De Kane cried. “No, I guess he won’t be troubled by any more cats, Rood. Not him.” Henry had the uneasy feeling that De Kane was reveling in hidden sarcasm.
“Not Stuyvesant!” said De Kane. “If he’s your client, you’d better know about it. Matthew Stuyvesant has just been found murdered. Some hysterical woman called up headquarters and she was babbling about a big black cat sitting on Matthew Stuyvesant’s chest.”
Chapter VI
Murdered by a Tom
The quiet old home of Matthew Stuyvesant was more quiet than ever. But it lacked the atmosphere of security and well being it had held these many years.
The quiet of the house was the hushed, breathless first impulse of awe and terror.
The three scared servants sat stiffly in the reception room under the guardianship of two police patrolmen, who had come off their beats to take charge, pending De Kane’s arrival.
In the second story bedroom Matthew Stuyvesant’s body lay as it had been found, stretched on the cover of his bed. Stuyvesant had removed his coat, vest and linen collar and slipped on a light dressing gown before he lay down to sleep.
The neck of this gown gaped open, exposing the dead man’s throat and chest. Henry Rood pointed silently to three red marks or punctures at the base of the throat.
“Scratches,” he murmured, keeping his voice low, as though the dead man might waken. “Scratches, like a cat might make with its claws.”
“Look at his face!” De Kane growled. “Looks like a man that was scared to death. If what I heard by telephone is so, I guess he was. You say he was scared of cats, Henry?”
Henry nodded. He went into Stuyvesant’s bath which opened off the bedroom. The door of the white enamel medicine closet was closed, but not locked. Henry looked for and found the bottle of sedative about which Stuyvesant and Mrs. Loos had disputed. The bottle was about half filled. Henry dropped it into his coat pocket. “I’ll tell you later,” he said in answer to De Kane’s stare of inquiry.
The news of his client’s death had been a violent shock to Henry. But he was not wasting any time on his own emotions. Shocks might jolt him, but they only served to make him think harder.
“I’ve seen all I want,” De Kane said. “Shall we go downstairs and question the servants?”
Matthew Stuyvesant’s death had been discovered about an hour and a half after Henry Rood left the house last. Alf Doran, the furnace man, was the discoverer.
“I had been up to my own room on the third floor,” Doran said. “I went up just after Mr. Rood left and I was there quite awhile, reading a book. Don’t get much leisure to do that in this house, and I was interested in that story. I don’t know where Mrs. Loos and Gertie was. Didn’t see ’em, didn’t hear ’em, so I guess they was down in the basement. I saw it was half past five and time to be looking after my fires, so I put on my hat and come down.
“I was just stepping off the stair onto this floor when I heard kind of a snarllike — or a yowl. The house was dead still up to then and it gave me an awful start!”
Doran shuddered in spite of himself and apologized with a grim smile. “Those damn cats,” he said. “They got on my nerves something awful the last two weeks!
“So I was standing there, surprisedlike and listening, and I hear that yowling or snarling again and it seems to come out of Mr. Stuyvesant’s room. My slithers, I says aloud, one of ’em has got in again—”
“One moment, Doran,” Henry interrupted here. “Was the hall door to Mr. Stuyvesant’s room closed?”
“Closed,” Doran answered, “but when I put my hand on it I see it had been left off the latch. Like somebody closed it and was careless about the latch.”
“I closed that door myself,” Mrs. Loos spoke up. “I guess I was the last one in that room before Doran. I was giving Mr. Stuyvesant his sleeping drops. I latched it, too. I always latch doors.”
“It was off the latch,” Doran went on steadily. “I pushed it open. I was hoping if a cat had got in there, I could shoo it out without waking the boss. I looked in. There was Mr. Stuyvesant lying just like he is now, dead. And on his chest, flattened low and snarling into his face, was that damned black cat!”
Doran’s voice shook. He wiped his face and hands with a handkerchief. “God!” he cried suddenly.
Gertie gasped a pious ejaculation.
Police Captain De Kane scowled from one face to another. De Kane was a practical man and anything not readily explained, anything that verged on the weird, annoyed him.
“Now, your story.” De Kane pointed at the housekeeper.
“The last I saw of Mr. Stuyvesant I gave him his drops,” Mrs. Loos began. “Mr. Rood knows about that—”
“I heard you speak to him about it,” Henry corrected.
“Well, I gave him the dose just after you left the house — say a matter of five minutes after. Mr. Stuyvesant went to sleep like a baby and I came back downstairs. I was in the basement sitting room going over household accounts. Gertie was out in the kitchen, getting things ready for dinner. She came and asked me about things two times and I heard her moving around, too.
“Nothing happened until just before Doran yelled for us to come. Maybe it was three or four minutes before or maybe a little less, I heard a cat yowling. I couldn’t make out where the yowling came from. I called to Gertie to listen and we both stood in the basement hall.”
Mrs. Loos, whose voice had been steady and manner composed, exhibited the first signs of hysteria as her mind reviewed that moment.
“Well?” De Kane questioned impatiently, for the housekeeper seemed unable to go on.
“Well... well, nothing came of it. We just stood there listening. Gertie was pretty rattled—”
“No more than you, Mrs. Loos!” Gertie interposed tartly.
“We heard that cat yowl a couple of times and we couldn’t locate the sound. It was a very distant sound, muffled and faint. Then Doran yelled from upstairs, and the way he yelled, we both knew something awful had happened. We ran up to the second story and saw Mr. Stuyvesant lying dead.”
“Did you see a black cat on his breast — or anywhere in the room?” De Kane asked.
Both women shook their heads.
“The window screen was pushed open,” Mrs. Loos said. “It is one of those slide screens that fit any window and it had been hit a blow — you can see the dent in the wire — and was jarred out of the frame. Doran said the black cat jumped at the screen, knocked it loose and went out over the porch roof.”
“That is quite correct,” Doran agreed.
Gertie’s statement was merely a corroboration of the housekeeper’s account.
De Kane asked: “What do you know about this, Henry?”
Henry detailed his day with Matthew Stuyvesant.
“Stuyvesant, we know, had an inherited fear of cats, one of those fears that you can’t cure,” Henry summed up. “For more than two weeks his house has been haunted by cats. Stuyvesant also had a bad heart. His nervousness disturbed his rest and his condition became dangerous, from excitement and heart strain. The natural conclusion from the story of these witnesses is that Matthew Stuyvesant came out of his sleep this afternoon to find one of those uncanny cats lying on his breast, snarling into his face. The shock of that horrible waking stopped his weak heart forever. In other words, Matthew Stuyvesant died of acute fright.”