racing cars… Did I hear a bell ring?”
“That’s the potatoes!”
“Hang up! Talk to you later.”
Qwilleran had plans for Monday morning. He would walk downtown and have pancakes and sausage at Lois’s Luncheonette, then go to the newspaper office and throw his copy on Junior Goodwinter’s desk. If the young managing editor found it unfit to print, so be it! Let them run a couple of paragraphs of hype from the museum’s publicity release!
When Monday came, however, the situation demanded change. Koko was restless. After hardly touching his breakfast, he kept jumping at the door handle of the broom closet. That was a place of incarceration for the Siamese when they misbehaved, but it also housed harnesses and leashes. Obviously Koko wanted an outing. Did he sense the presence of a parrot in the neighborhood, a few tenths of a mile away? Given his remarkable long-range instincts, it was not unthinkable.
The sight of buckles and straps sent Yum Yum flying up the ramp to the roof, but Koko pranced with excitement. For the hike down the lane, he was propped on Qwilleran’s shoulder, and there was a firm hand on the leash. Though indifferent to flitting birds and scurrying squirrels, the cat tensed his body as they neared the Art Center and uttered guttural noises as they went through the private gate.
“Steady, old boy,” Qwilleran reassured him in a ca1m voice. “It’s only… “Then he saw the reason for Koko’s alarm. Although there was no vehicle around, the door of the building was open - wide open - and Koko sensed trouble. How did he know it should be closed? Because Koko always knew when something was not as it should be: a faucet running, the oven left on, a light burning in daylight. His catly perception was uncanny.
Qwilleran quickened his step and tightened his grip on the leash. Entering cautiously, he saw muddy footprints on the light vinyl floor and allowed Koko to jump down. Without hesitation, the cat tugged the man toward the studio wing, sniffing the floor like a hound, until he came to a dark red splotch on the floor between the manager’s office and the Butterfly Girl’s studio.
“Someone killed him!” Qwilleran said
aloud. “Someone killed Jasper!”
“Gimme a peanut!” came the croaking reply.
Jasper’s cage was uncovered, and he was rocking on his perch and blinking his large round eyes. His night blanket was on the floor, splashed with blood. The small table had been knocked over, scattering peanuts and the pieces of a smashed Oriental vase.
Someone, Qwilleran thought, had expected to steal the bird and had put a hand too close to the cage, only to have Jasper’s powerful hookbill grab a finger. In confusion the intruder had fled from the building.
But Koko had seen enough of Jasper and the blood spots; he was tugging again at the leash, tugging toward the studio with animal sketches lined up around the walls. Ignoring the dogs and horses, he went directly to the open bin where shrink-wrapped drawings were stored. He stood on his hind legs and peered at the contents. Qwilleran had a look, too. Only the large figure studies were there. The small ones - there had been a dozen or more - were gone!
Now it was clear: it was the nudes they were after, not the bird. They had loaded the drawings in a sack and stopped on the way out to hear Jasper say something insulting or obscene.
Dragging Koko away from the scene and temporarily locking him in the restroom, Qwilleran called 911 from the manager’s office across from the bloody field of action. He reported a breakin and possible burglary. Next he phoned the city desk at the Something. Finally he phoned the manager’s home. Beverly Forfar lived on Pleasant Street and she arrived shortly after the sheriff’s deputy.
“What’s that noise?” were her first words as she walked in.
Koko was howling his protest, which was amplified by the tile walls of his prison.
Beverly inspected all the rooms, and Qwilleran drew her attention to the missing figure studies.
“Daphne might’ve taken them home,” she said. “I’ll call her.”
Roger MacGillivray was arriving with his camera, and Qwilleran gathered up the cat and made a stealthy exit via the side door. He wanted no photographs of Koko in the paper, no headlines about a feline bloodhound.
He was intensely protective of Koko’s privacy. The cat’s psychic aptitudes were known only to two other persons, both of them in law enforcement. Even Polly and Arch were ignorant of Koko’s detective instincts; neither of them would take the notion seriously. Qwilleran himself was hard put for an explanation, except that normal cats had forty-eight whiskers, eyebrows included, and Koko had sixty.
When the news item appeared in that day’s paper, it was said that the sheriff had responded to a call from “a neighbor,” who had seen the front door open. Some “works of art” were missing. The intruder had been “pecked and chased away” by a pet parrot on the premises.
The item appeared on page three, because page one had already been made up. It featured Roger’s glowing account of the Art Center opening and announced the names of the two raffle winners: Ronald Frobnitz and Thornton Haggis. (Hah! Qwilleran thought; the other guy used an alias, too.) Also on page one was his own tongue-in-cheek report on the dedication ceremony at the Farmhouse Museum:
On Saturday afternoon at the Goodwinter Museum in North Middle Hummock a throng of 310 visitors drank 450 cups of tea and viewed a collection of 417 historic artifacts in the 1,800-square- foot steel barn, where 83 volunteers have spent a total of 2,110 hours cataloguing and storing items donated by 291 residents of Moose County.
“This is the first and last time this storage facility is being shown to the public,” stated a museum spokesperson. “As items are needed for changing exhibits in the farmhouse, the new system will tell us what we have available and exactly where it is stored.”
The computerized catalogue is made possible by public contributions and a matching grant from the Klingenschoen Foundation. Printouts of the inventory are available for a small donation to cover copying and handling. For a similar donation the donors of artifacts in storage may have access to them for photographing. All donations are tax-deductible.
At Qwilleran’s request there was no by-line for the three paragraphs or the photos; which included shots of the museum manager, the steel barn, and visitors at the refreshment table. Accompanying the museum story was an anonymous poem of sorts in a decorative border:
NOSTALGIA
Twenty-four chairs with legs, Ten chairs with one leg missing, Gramophone with Caruso records, Seven flags with 48 stars, Doctor’s folding operating table. And four white enamel bedpans. Thirty-seven pieces of china, cracked, Five handmade quilts, stained, Two wooden washboards, mildewed, Woman’s hat with ostrich plumes, molted, Nurse’s uniform, circa 1910. And three bedpans in gray graniteware. Two pearl-handled buttonhooks, Box of 207 handwritten postcards, Five school desks carved with initials, Six-and-a-half pairs of high-buttoned shoes, Hot-water bottle without a stopper. And two bedpans in blue spatterware. Box of 145 photographs, unidentified, Three straight razors, Pair of men’s gray suede spats, Fur-lined sleighcoat, moth-eaten, Set of surgical saws and scalpels. And one genuine Bennington bedpan.
Although Qwilleran avoided the newspaper office Monday afternoon, the chaos was reported to him. Readers calling with raves and rebukes jammed the phone lines, and the local telephone company curtailed service to the paper rather than jeopardize the entire county-wide system. The manager of the museum, a
newcomer in Pickax, demanded the dismissal of the perpetrator of the outrage, unaware that the Something owed its existence to the Klingenschoen Foundation. An editorial meeting was called to consider the ruckus, but the executives and editors around the table gave a standing ovation to the coverage, and the meeting broke up in laughter.