Lilian Jackson Braun - TCW 04: The Cat Who Saw Red

For Qwilleran the day seemed interminable. He skipped lunch. At noon Rosemary stopped at his door with a ball of yarn; she had been tidying her knitting basket and thought the cats would enjoy some exercise with a ball of yarn. Qwilleran invited her to come in, but she was on her way to work. In the afternoon the sun disappeared behind a bank of gray clouds, and the cold light flooding through the huge studio window drenched the apartment in gloom. The cats felt the chill. Ignoring the yam, they crept behind the books in the bookcase and found a cozier place for their afternoon nap.

Qwilleran was thankful when the time came to leave for the Stilton Hotel. He needed a change of scene and a change of thought, and he was glad, somewhat, that he had invited the babbling Hixie Rice. On the way to the hotel he stopped at the office to open his mail, and a fleeting impulse sent him to the Fluxion library to pick up an old clip file on the River Road pottery... the Penniman Pottery, as it was originally known.

He met Hixie in the hotel lobby. It seemed to the newsman that she was exhibiting desperate gaiety with her cherry red suit and shrimp pink hat laden with straw carrots, turnips, and radishes.

"That's a tasty chapeau," Qwilleran remarked.

"Merci, monsieur." She fluttered her double set of I eyelashes. "I'm glad you like it."

"I didn't say that."

"Oh, you're a kidder!" Hixie gave him a playful shove. "I couldn't resist the straw legumes. You know me!... Do you speak French?"

"Only enough to keep out of trouble in Paris."

"I'm taking a Berlitz course. Say something in French."

"Camembert, Roquefort, Brie," said Qwilleran.

The annual Choose Cheese celebration was being hosted by the cheese industry in the hotel ballroom. The hundred or more guests, however, were patronizing the free bar and ignoring the long table of assorted cheeses.

"This is a typical press party," Qwilleran explained. "About six of the guests are members of the working press, and nobody knows who the others are or why they were invited."

He smoked his pipe and sampled a Danish cheese made with skim milk. Hixie sipped a Manhattan and sampled the Brie, Camembert, Cheshire, Edam, Gorgonzola, Gouda, Gruyere, Herkimer, Liederkranz, Mozzarella, Muenster, Parmesan, Port du Salut, and Roquefort.

"Is that all you're going to eat, for gosh sake?" she asked.

"I might take a little Roquefort home to Koko," Qwilleran said arid then added, "We had an unexpected visitor today Miss Roop. I sense that she disapproves of cats. Koko didn't approve of her, either."

"Charlotte disapproves of everything," said Hixie. "Smoking, drinking, gambling, divorce, short skirts, shaggy dog stories, foreigners, motorcycles, movies with unhappy endings, politicians, gum-chewing, novels written after 1910, overtipping of waiters, and sex."

That kind always had a skeleton in the closet, Qwilleran thought. "Has there ever been any romance in her life?" he asked his well-informed companion.

"Who knows? I suspect she was secretly in love with Hash House Hashman. He's been dead for fifteen years, but she still talks about him all the time."

Qwilleran chewed his pipe stem thoughtfully. "Did you ever wonder what happened to Joy Graham's cat?"

Hixie shrugged. "Ran away, I suppose. Got picked up. Got run over by a bus. Fell in the river. Choose one of the above."

"Do you like pets?"

"If they don't cause trouble or tie you down too much. I bought myself a canary, but he seems to be a deaf-mute. That's just my luck. I'm a born loser."

Qwilleran sliced a wedge of Norwegian Gjetost and presented it to her on a cracker. "I suppose you know that Joy has disappeared."

"Yes, I heard she left him." For a moment Hixie's jovial expression changed to one Qwilleran could not identify, but her face quickly brightened again. "Try this Westphalian Sauermilch, mon ami. C'est formidable!"

Qwilleran obliged and remarked that it was a little immature. It had not quite achieved total putrefaction. He was determined, however, not to let her change the subject. "Did you ever see Joy throw a pot on the wheel?" he asked.

"No, but she almost threw a pot at my head once. I accidentally broke a dumb-looking pitcher she'd made, and after that I wasn't exactly welcome in the pottery."

"We've got a colorful tribe at Maus Haus. What kind of guy is Max Sorrel?"

"A confirmed bachelor," Hixie groaned. "His only love affair is with that big fat restaurant... Poor Max! He's got the legendary heart of gold, and he doesn't deserve the trouble he's having."

"What kind of trouble?"

"Don't you know? He may lose his restaurant. He's even had to sell his boat! He has or he did have a gorgeous thirty-six-foot cruiser that he used to tie up behind Maus Haus."

"What's the problem?"

"You mean you haven't heard the rumors?" Qwilleran scowled and shook his head, professionally humiliated because rumors were circulating and he, a member of the Press Club, was in the dark. "People are saying all kinds of absurd things. Like, Max's head chef has a horrible disease. Like, a customer found something unspeakable in his soup. Sick jokes."

"Sounds like poison tongue campaign."

"It's rotten, because Max runs a meticulously clean restaurant. And yet the rumors have mushroomed, and the customers are staying away in droves."

"I thought the Golden Lamb Chop had a sophisticated clientele. They should know that the Board of Health "

"Nobody believes the rumors, but cafe society and the gambling crowd won't patronize a spot that's being laughed at. And they've been Max's best customers."

"Does he have any idea how the thing started?"

She shook her head. "He's very well liked allover town. I told him he ought to get one of the papers to print a story about it, so he could deny everything publicly, but he said that would only attract more unwelcome attention. He's hoping it will blow over before he goes completely broke."

"It's slander, " Qwilleran said. "He's got a case if he can find out who's behind it."

"That's what Robert says, but Max can't trace a thing."

Qwilleran had considered inviting Hixie to dinner even after all the cheese but he changed his mind. He wanted to go to the Golden Lamb Chop, and he wanted to go alone. Taking her home in a taxi, he sensed her disappointment.

"Do you like baseball?" he asked. "I can get seats in the press box some weekend, if you'd like to go." He was being noble. If his friends in the press box saw him with this overweight, overdressed, overexpressive date, they'd never let him live it down.

"Sure, I like baseball. Especially the hot dogs."

"Any particular team you'd like to see?"

"Whoever's at the bottom of the league. I like to root for the underdog."

When Qwilleran returned to Number Six to give the cats some turkey with a garnish of Roquefort, he was greeted by a scene of incredible beauty. The apartment had been transformed into a work of art. The cats had found Rosemary's ball of gray yarn and had spun a web that enmeshed every article of furniture in the room. They had rolled the ball across the floor, tossed it over chairs, looped it around table legs, carried it up to the desk and around the typewriter and down again to the floor, hooking it in the jaws of the bear before repeating the same basic design with variations. Now the cats sat on the bookcase, as motionless as statuary, contemplating their creation.