Free Blond Baboon by Janwillem van de Wetering

hospitalization. The old lady’s sister was waiting for a chance to say something too. A related subject, no doubt, something to do with varicose veins or the cartilage between the spine’s vertebrae that wears away in old age and causes pains. Cardozo put his cup down and picked up a cookie and nibbled on it.
    “Yes.” he said. He arranged a proper expression of commiseration. It sat on his face like a thin plastic mask. Underneath there was nothing but raw impatience, but the mask fitted well. The ladies’ birdlike voices prattled on. He had to go through all of it. He even knew their ages now. Seventy-eight, eighty-two. That’s old. They wouldn’t live much longer, but they were alive now and they had seen something and their statements would be acceptable to a judge, and Constable First Class Cardozo meant to get those statements.
    He felt his pocket. The pen was there, so was his notebook. He would write out two statements and have them signed individually—the judge wouldn’t like a joint statement. Whatever the two ladies had seen they had seen on their own, and the judge would want to know what they had seen in their own words. They had said they had seen something. They had seen Mr. de Bree, that nasty, ill-mannered man with the fat face. Men shouldn’t have fat faces, didn’t the detective think so? Sure, he thought so. As nasty as his cat. Mr. de Bree’s cat also had a fat face. And he was always catching the nice little birds; he had even caught the thrush that sang so beautifully, and chomped on the poor little thing and spread its feathers all over Mr. de Bree’s garden. The old ladies had watched the onslaught through their binoculars. Weren’t they nice binoculars? Alice had specially fetched them to show them to the detective. Beautiful copper binoculars, they don’t make them like that anymore these days. She and her sister used to take them to the theater and to the opera. But that was a long time ago.
    “Yes,” Cardozo said. He wasn’t going to ask more questions. He had asked them already, they knew exactly what he wanted, and they would tell him, in their own time. He glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes gone, and another two hours on the rest of his search. He had been everywhere, in any house that had a view of the Carnet garden. Nobody had seen anything, but everybody knew Mr. de Bree. A nasty man, he knew that by now, he knew it by his own experience. He hadn’t forgotten the red scowling face glaring at him before the door banged with such force that a particle of plaster from the porch’s ceiling had dropped at his feet.
    He had been given several descriptions of the de Bree cat, a pampered monstrosity with a half-orange, half-black face, which gave the beast two appearances, depending on which side he was approached, but they were both bad. The cat was the terror of the gardens and the main source of the torn ears and bad wounds of other cats. He had also heard reports on Paul, the Carnet clog. Paul was nice. An intelligent, jolly dog who had successfully defended his domain against the de Bree cat, until he was poisoned.
    “There he is,” the old lady called Alice said and tugged at Cardozo’s sleeve. He saw the cat, jumping leisurely across the liguster hedge dividing the de Bree and Carnet properties. “Big, isn’t he? Twenty pounds of bad cat.”
    And then they told him, whispering, hissing, glancing over their shoulders to see if some mysterious shadow in the room were listening in. They had seen de Bree feeding Paul. Chopped steak, they were sure of it. They had trained their binoculars on him, they had seen every detail of the murderous attempt. Two days ago now, in the afternoon. The Carnet ladies weren’t in and Paul was playing by himself in the garden, snapping at flies and dancing about, throwing his little pink rubber ball. And de Bree had come out with the meat and Paul had eaten it.
    “But why didn’t you tell the Carnet ladies?” Cardozo asked