“But she found out,” Drogan said. “She brought it inside herself, in her arms. It was purring, just as it is now. But it wouldn’t come near me. It never has … yet. She poured it a saucer of milk. ‘Oh, look at the poor thing, it’s starving,’ she cooed. She and Carolyn both cooed over it. Disgusting. It was their way of getting back at me, of course. They knew the way I’ve felt about felines ever since the Tri-Dormal-G testing program twenty years ago. They enjoyed teasing me, baiting me with it.” He looked at Halston grimly. “But they paid.”
In mid-May, Gage had gotten up to set breakfast and found Amanda Drogan lying at the foot of the main stairs in a litter of broken crockery and Little Friskies. Her eyes bulged sightlessly up at the ceiling. She had bled a great deal from the mouth and nose. Her back was broken, both legs were broken, and her neck had been literally shattered like glass.
“It slept in her room,” Drogan said. “She treated it like a baby …’Is oo hungwy, darwing? Does oo need to go out and do poopoos!’ Obscene, coming from an old baffle-ax like my sister. I think it woke her up, meowing. She got his dish. She used to say that Sam didn’t really like his Friskies unless they were wetted down with a little milk. So she was planning to go downstairs. The cat was rubbing against her legs. She was old, not too steady on her feet. Half asleep. They got to the head of the stairs and the cat got in front of her … tripped her .. .”
Yes, it could have happened that way, Halston thought. In his mind’s eye he saw the old woman falling forward and outward, too shocked to scream. The Friskies spraying out as she tumbled head over heels to the bottom, the bowl smashing. At last she comes to rest at the bottom, the old bones shattered, the eyes glaring, the nose and ears trickling blood. And the purring cat begins to work its way down the stairs, contentedly munching Little Friskies …
“What did the coroner say?” he asked Drogan. “Death by accident, of course. But I knew.”
“Why didn’t you get rid of the cat then? With Amanda gone?”
Because Carolyn Broadmoor had threatened to leave if he did, apparently. She was hysterical, obsessed with the subject. She was a sick woman, and she was nutty on the subject of spiritualism. A Hartford medium had told her (for a mere twenty dollars) that Amanda’s soul had entered Sam’s feline body. Sam had been Amanda’s, she told Drogan, and if Sam went, she went.
Halston, who had become something of an expert at reading between the lines of human lives, suspected that Drogan and the old Broadmoor bird had been lovers long ago, and the old dude was reluctant to let her go over a cat.
“It would have been the same as suicide,” Drogan said. “In her mind she was still a wealthy woman, perfectly capable of packing up that cat and going to New York or London or even Monte Carlo with it. In fact she was the last of a great family, living on a pittance as a result of a number of bad investments in the sixties. She lived on the second floor here in a specially controlled, superhumidified room. The woman was seventy, Mr. Halston. She was a heavy smoker until the last two years of her life, and the emphysema was very bad. I wanted her here, and if the cat had to stay …”
Halston nodded and then glanced meaningfully at his watch.
“Near the end of June, she died in the night. The doctor seemed to take it as a matter of course … just came and wrote out the death certificate and that was the end of it. But the cat was in the room. Gage told me.”
“We all have to go sometime, man,” Halston said.
“Of course. That’s what the doctor said. But I knew. I remembered. Cats like to get babies and old people when they’re asleep. And steal their breath.”