Something the Cat Dragged In Read Online Free PDF Page B

sensible, or to the Balaclavian Society that doesn’t need it and wouldn’t use it, which would be more like him. I suppose there must be a relative or two somewhere because there always are, but he never mentioned any and they never came to see him. As for who his friends were, I expect you’d know better than I. He must have had his old cronies up at the college.”
    “Well—er—actually, no,” Shandy confessed. “Most faculty members of his—er—vintage aren’t around any longer, and those who are, like John Enderble, have their—er—sundry occupations. I myself hardly knew Professor Ungley, except to nod to in the faculty dining room when we happened to be there at the same times”
    Mrs. Lomax nodded. “Then it looks as if he only had that lot from the club. They’re all well-heeled themselves, so they wouldn’t need any inheritance from him. Though I suppose he might have left ’em his penknives out of sentiment.” Mrs. Lomax could be pretty funny at times, though nobody was ever sure whether or not she was doing it on purpose. “That’s assuming he ever bestirred himself to make a will. If he did, he’d have got Henry Hodger to write it up for him, and you can bet Henry won’t lose any time coming forward if he smells another fee in it for him.”
    Shandy was willing to take Mrs. Lomax’s word for that. However, Henry Hodger’s hypothetical fee was not the matter uppermost in his mind at the moment. “You say the place has been broken into? How can you tell? It looks perfectly tidy to me.”
    “Oh, it’s neat enough as far as that goes,” said Mrs. Lomax, “but there’s little things I can see that you wouldn’t ever notice. Nor would anybody else except Professor Ungley if he was alive. And he’d have come jawing at me about ’em if it meant dragging me out of my warm bed at three o’clock in the morning.”
    “So you’re saying it happened after he was dead.”
    “No I’m not, because I don’t know when he died. That mush-brained Fred Ottermole never thought to ask Mrs. Pommell when the meeting broke up, for one thing. I’d guess they must have called it quits sometime around eleven because that was when the professor usually got back here, though don’t ask me what he found worth staying for in the first place. If he left with the rest of ’em, which he must have or she wouldn’t have said so with five other people in a position to call her a liar, then I’d say he was probably waylaid a few minutes later. After he’d turned the corner off Main Street, like as not. Unless he hung around down there by himself in the cold, which doesn’t seem likely, does it?”
    “Most unlikely, I should think,” Shandy agreed. “We might be safe in assuming whoever broke in here knew it was safe to do so because Ungley wouldn’t be coming back. Otherwise, there’d have been the risk of his making a row, which you’d have heard.”
    “I certainly would. Nothing wrong with my ears so far, knock wood. Furthermore, I sat up late reading some foolish book I got from the library—it was a detective story but she wasn’t about to confess that to Professor Shandy—“and Edmund was asleep in my lap the whole time. He’d have hopped up and made a fuss the way he always does if a stranger so much as sets foot on the doorstep. It was about twenty minutes to twelve when I let him out for the night. Come to think of it, I noticed then that the light over the front steps was still on.”
    “Wouldn’t that have told you Ungley wasn’t in yet?”
    “Yes, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I knew he was giving the talk, see, and not to speak ill of the dead, once Professor Ungley got started, he wasn’t easy to stop. I figured he must still be down there chewing the fat with those other old gaffers. Now, there’s a funny thing.”
    “What is?”
    “The light was off when I came down this morning. I’d have noticed if it wasn’t. That proves somebody was here, because I