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

dollars. Then Ben sold it to Andy for sixty dollars. After that, Russ gave Andy seventy-five for it and put new leather on the seat. When C.C. saw it, he wanted it back, so Russ let it go for a hundred and twenty-five, and yesterday we sold it for two hundred and twenty dollars.”
    “Cozy arrangement,” said Qwilleran.
    “Don’t put that in the paper, though.”
    “Do all the dealers get along well?”
    “Oh, yes. Occasionally there’s a flare-up, like the time Andy fired Russ for drinking on the job, but it was soon forgotten. Russ is the one with the gorgeous blond hair. I used to have lovely blond hair myself, but it turned ashen overnight when I lost my first husband. I suppose I should have something done to it.”
    After breakfast Qwilleran called the telephonecompany and asked to have an instrument connected at 6331 Zwinger.
    “There will be a fif-ty dol-lar de-pos-it, sir,” said the singsong female voice on the line.
    “Fifty! In advance! I never heard of such a thing!”
    “Sor-ry. You are in zone thirteen. There is a fif-ty dol-lar de-pos-it.”
    “What’s the zone got to do with it?” Qwilleran shouted into the mouthpiece. “I need that phone immediately, and I’m not going to pay your outrageous deposit! I’m a staff writer for the Daily Fluxion, and I’m going to report this to the managing editor.”
    “One moment, please.”
    He turned to the landlady. “Of all the high-handed nerve! They want eight months’ payment in advance.”
    “We get that kind of treatment all the time in Junktown,” Iris said with a meek shrug.
    The voice returned to the line. “Ser-vice will be sup-plied at once, sir. Sor-ry, sir.”
    Qwilleran was still simmering with indignation when he left the house to cover his beat. He was also unhappy about the loss of his red feather. He was sure it had been in his hatband the night before, but now it was gone, and without it the tweed porkpie lost much of its éclat. A search of the apartment and staircase produced nothing but a cat’s hairball and a red gum wrapper.
    On Zwinger Street the weather growled at him, and he was in a mood to growl back. All was gray—the sky, the snow, the people. At that moment a white Jaguar sleeked down the street and turnedinto the carriage house on the block. Qwilleran regarded it as a finger of fate and followed it.
    Russell Patch’s refinishing shop had been a two-carriage carriage house in its heyday. Now it was half garage and half showroom. The Jaguar shared the space with items of furniture in the last stages of despair—peeling, mildewed, crazed, waterstained, or merely gray with dirt and age—and the premises smelled high of turpentine and lacquer.
    Qwilleran heard a scuffing and thumping sound in the back room, and a moment later a husky young man appeared, swinging ably across the rough floor on metal crutches. He was dressed completely in white—white ducks, white open-necked shirt, white socks, white tennis shoes.
    Qwilleran introduced himself.
    “Yes, I know,” said Patch with a smile. “I saw you at the auction, and word got around who you were.”
    The newsman glanced about the shop. “This is what I call genuine junk-type junk. Do people really buy it?”
    “They sure do. It’s having a big thing right now. Everything you see here is in the rough; I refinish it to the customer’s specifications. See that sideboard? I’ll cut off the legs, paint the whole thing mauve, stripe it in magenta, spatter it with umber, and give it a glaze of Venetian bronze. It’s going into a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house in Lost Lake Hills.”
    “How long have you been doing this kind of work?”
    “Just six months for myself. Before that, I workedfor Andy Glanz for four years. Want to see how it’s done?”
    He led the way into the workshop, where he put on a long white coat like a butcher’s, daubed with red and brown.
    “This rocker,” he said, “was sitting out in a barnyard for years. I tightened it up, gave it