“I need not explain anything, but I will,” Drogan said. “Forewarned is forearmed, they say, and I would not want you to go into this lightly. And I seem to need to justify myself. So you’ll not think I’m insane.”
Halston nodded again. He had already decided to make this peculiar hit, and no further talk was needed. But if Drogan wanted to talk, he would listen. “First of all, you know who I am? Where the money comes from?”
“Drogan Pharmaceuticals.”
“Yes. One of the biggest drug companies in the world. And the cornerstone of our financial success has been this.” From the pocket of his robe he handed Halston a small, unmarked vial of pills. “Tri-Dormal-phenobarbin, compound G. Prescribed almost exclusively for the terminally ill. It’s extremely habit-forming, you see. It’s a combination painkiller, tranquilizer, and mild hallucinogen. It is remarkably helpful in helping the terminally ill face their conditions and adjust to them.”
“Do you take it?” Halston asked.
Drogan ignored the question. “It is widely prescribed throughout the world. It’s a synthetic, was developed in the fifties at our New Jersey labs. Our testing was confined almost solely to cats, because of the unique quality of the feline nervous system.”
“How many did you wipe out?”
Drogan stiffened. “That is an unfair and prejudicial way to put it.”
Halston shrugged.
“In the four-year testing period which led to FDA approval of Tri-Dormal-G, about fifteen thousand cats … uh, expired.”
Halston whistled. About four thousand cats a year. “And now you think this one’s back to get you, huh?”
“I don’t feel guilty in the slightest,” Drogan said, but that quavering, petulant note was back in his voice. “Fifteen thousand test animals died so that hundreds of thousands of human beings – ”
“Never mind that,” Halston said. Justifications bored him.
“That cat came here seven months ago. I’ve never liked cats. Nasty, disease-bearing animals … always out in the fields … crawling around in barns … picking up God knows what germs in their fur … always trying to bring something with its insides falling out into the house for you to look at … it was my sister who wanted to take it in. She found out. She paid.” He looked at the cat sleeping on Halston’s lap with dead hate.
“You said the cat killed three people.”
Drogan began to speak. The cat dozed and purred on Halston’s lap under the soft, scratching strokes of Halston’s strong and expert killer’s fingers.
Occasionally a pine knot would explode on the hearth, making it tense like a series of steel springs covered with hide and muscle. Outside the wind whined around the big stone house far out in the Connecticut countryside. There was winter in that wind’s throat. The old man’s voice droned on and on.
Seven months ago there had been four of them here-Drogan, his sister Amanda, who at seventy-four was two years Drogan’s elder, her lifelong friend Carolyn Broadmoor (“of the Westchester Broadmoors,” Drogan.said), who was badly afflicted with emphysema, and Dick Gage, a hired man who had been with the Drogan family for twenty years. Gage, who was past sixty himself, drove the big Lincoln Mark IV, cooked, served the evening sherry. A day maid came in. The four of them had lived this way for nearly two years, a dull collection of old people and their family retainer. Their only pleasures were The Hollywood Squares and waiting to see who would outlive whom.
Then the cat had come.
“It was Gage who saw it first, whining and skulking around the house. He tried to drive it away He threw sticks and small rocks at it, and hit it several times. But it wouldn’t go. It smelled the food, of course. It was little more than a bag of bones. People put them out beside the road to die at the end of the summer season, you know. A terrible, inhumane thing.”
“Better to fry their nerves?” Halston asked.
Drogan ignored that and went on. He hated cats. He always had. When the cat refused to be driven away, he had instructed Gage to put out poisoned food. Large, tempting dishes of Calo cat food spiked with Tri-Dormal-G, as a matter of fact. The cat ignored the food. At that point Amanda Drogan had noticed the cat and had insisted they take it in. Drogan had protested vehemently, but Amanda – had gotten her way. She always did, apparently.