Free The Cat Who Turned on and Off by Lilian Jackson Braun

because I had been unpleasant to Andy.”
    “What did you dream?”
    “I dreamed . . . I kept dreaming that I had pushed Andy to his death on that finial!”
    Qwilleran paused before making his comment. “There may be an element of fact in your dream.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I have a hunch that Andy’s death was not an accidental fall from a ladder.” As he said it, he again felt the telltale prickling in his moustache.
    Mary became defensive. “The police called it an accident.”
    “Did they investigate? Did they come to see you? They must have inquired who found the body.”
    She shook her head.
    “Did they interview people in the neighborhood?”
    “It was not necessary. It was obviously a mishap. Where did you get the idea that it might have been . . . anything else?”
    “One of your talkative neighbors—this morning—”
    “Nonsense.”
    “I assumed he must have some reason for calling it murder.”
    “Just an irresponsible remark. Why would anyone say such a thing?”
    “I don’t know.” Then Qwilleran watched Mary’s eyes grow wide as he added, “But by a strange coincidence, the man who told me is now on his way to the morgue.”
    Whether it was that statement or the startling sound of the telephone bell, he could not tell, but Mary froze in her chair. It rang several times.
    “Want me to answer?” Qwilleran offered, glancing at his watch.
    She hesitated, then nodded slowly.
    He found the phone in the library across the hall.“Hello? . . . Hello? . . . Hello? . . . They hung up,” he reported when he returned to the living room. Then noticing Mary’s pallor, he asked, “Have you had this kind of call before? Have you been getting crank calls? Is that why you stay up late?”
    “No, I’ve always been a night owl,” she said, shaking off her trance. “My friends know it, and someone was probably phoning to—discuss the late movie on TV. They often do that. Whoever it was undoubtedly hung up because of hearing a man’s voice. It would appear that I had company, or it might have seemed to be a wrong number.”
    She talked too fast and explained too much. Qwilleran was unconvinced.

SEVEN
    Qwilleran went home through snow that was ankle-deep, its hush accentuating the isolated sounds of the night: a blast of jukebox music from The Lion’s Tail, the whine of an electric motor somewhere, the idle bark of a dog. But first he stopped at the all-night drugstore on the corner and telephoned the Fluxion ’s night man in the Press Room at Police Headquarters and asked him to check two Dead on Arrivals from the Junktown area.
    “One came in tonight and one October sixteenth,” Qwilleran said. “Call me back at this number, will you?”
    While he was waiting, he ordered a ham sandwich and considered the evidence. The death of the man in a horse-blanket coat might have no significance, but the fear in Mary’s eyes was real and incontrovertible, and her emphatic insistence that Andy’s death was an accident left plenty of room for conjecture. If it was murder, there had to be motive, and Qwilleran had an increasing curiosity about the young man of superior integrity who made citizen’s arrests. He knew the type. On the surface they looked good, but they could be troublemakers.
    The phone call came in from the police reporter. “That October DOA was filed as accidental death,” he said, “but I couldn’t get any dope on the other one. Why don’t you try again in the morning?”
    Qwilleran went home, tiptoed up the protesting stairs of the Cobb mansion, unlocked his door with the big key, and searched for the cats. They were asleep on their blue cushion on top of the refrigerator, curled together in a single mound of fur with one nose, one tail and three ears. One eye opened and looked at him, and Qwilleran could not resist stroking the pair. Their fur was incredibly silky when they were relaxed, and it always appeared darker when they were asleep.
    Soon after, he