Judas Cat Read Online Free PDF Page B

more.”
    She nodded somewhat abstractly as though she were turning the thought over in her mind. He did not wait to see whether she passed it along to her friends.
    He felt uncomfortable with himself as he climbed into the car. It was a cheap thing to do, telling old Turnsby that. But he had to tell her something to keep her on his side. On his side for what? Why did the idea of Andy Mattson’s being murdered persist? He was ninety-two years old. The doors and windows to the house were locked from the inside. He knew the coroner’s report without seeing it. And yet the terror on the old man’s face stayed with him. Why should all the windows be closed up tight on the warmest days of summer?
    The sweet smell of the goldenrod reached him through the open car window. He could see the yellow panicles bending in the wind like women praying at an outdoor meeting. The field was so bright in contrast to the bleakness of Andy’s house.
    Andy did not have any close neighbors except Mabel Turnsby. The town seemed to have stopped growing there. The back yards of all the houses on that side of the street ran into the prairie. Half a mile away was Townline Road. Where it joined Highway 62 there was a barbecue stand. That was the nearest building to the east.
    Across the street the property holders seemed to have indulged themselves in acres of front lawns. For the most part they were well-to-do people—Art Baldwin, the barber, whose wife was cashier at the First National Bank; Martin Fabry, Fabry and Sons Lumber and Coal; Ned Oakes, owner of Hillside’s one shoe store, and Matt Sanders, the plumber. The four of them owned the entire west side of the street. It was strange, Alex thought, that the town had been built out that way, increasing in property value up to the east side of Sunrise Avenue. There a fringe of wooden frame houses remained from several generations back. Mabel’s house was the best of them, and all the others belonged to people of a lower income—workers in the toy factory for the most part.
    “Something wrong with the buggy?”
    It was Gilbert, and Alex realized that he had been sitting there for some time. The ladies on Miss Turnsby’s porch were looking at him. “No,” he said. “I was just thinking. See you later.”
    When Alex returned to the Sentinel office the plant had closed. Maude and Joan were still in the office. He liked this time of day best there. The presses were off and there was not the pressure of grinding out the routine printing orders that kept them in business.
    “I wonder what you’d be like if you had to meet a dateline oftener than once a week,” Maude said. “What happened? We heard you had the coroner over there.”
    “The old man’s dead,” Alex said.
    “Complete coverage,” Maude said.
    Joan came over from her desk to Maude’s. She had attended the state university with Alex, and when he had gone into the army, she had come into the Sentinel office, doing what Mr. Whiting called “leg work,” enjoying his own sententiousness. “I’ve dug up everything I could find in our files on the old man, Alex. It’s not much. Addison mostly. The last time he was here was March 12.”
    “Thanks, Joan. That’s what I figured. There isn’t much any place on Mattson, I’m afraid, not even in his house. I’ve been up there poking around all afternoon. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems to me there’s something fishy about it.”
    “How, fishy?” Maude said.
    “I don’t know exactly.” He sat down on the side of her desk and fit a cigarette. He offered one to Maude and she took it. Before she lighted it, however, she glanced up to see if the Venetian blinds had been drawn. Alex grinned.
    “You old hypocrite,” he said.
    She exhaled a healthy burst of smoke and brushed the hair back from her forehead. Alex could not remember when her hair had not look disheveled, and the gesture with the heel of her palm was as familiar as breakfast. Her fingers were always black