Judas Cat by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page A

for the Fables, no thanks to Alex in the field. Most of the crowd hung around for a while. “… Used to deliver coal in that shack of his. It’d come out the window and he wouldn’t let me go in and shovel it away. The place all boarded up. You’d think he had the atom bomb secret. What the hell, I didn’t care. Less work for me. Crazy as a loon if you ask me …” Alex went to the car and changed his shirt. A shack would have to be in the bushes behind the house. He remembered the path. The bushes were so thick it had not been visible from the porch.
    “Going to the stand for a coke, Whitie?”
    “Yeah. I’ll be over.” He met Joan at the door of the barbecue stand. Someone had already started the juke box, and the place was jammed. “Let’s stay outdoors for a while,” he said. “You look nice tonight.”
    “Thanks. Alex, everybody’s talking about Andy Mattson. They seem to take for granted he was murdered.”
    “That’s because the coroner was down. You know how people are. When they see a fire truck there has to be a fire. Want to take a walk, Joan? I don’t have the heart for a jam session tonight.”
    “I’d just as soon stay outdoors,” she said.
    The gravel of the parking lot crunched beneath their feet. It was almost dark now, the way darkness comes quickly in late August, and in the open field at the back of the stand the lightning bugs were as thick as stars. “I wonder where it’ll all end,” Alex said. “I wonder where it started. I get a melancholy sort of feeling when I think of the old man.”
    “Peggy Shiel and I were talking at the game,” Joan said. “She told me how she had met him down in front of the town hall one day during the war. He was looking at the honor roll. When he saw her he asked her if she knew the boys on the list. She said she knew most of them, and he pointed his stick at her and asked her if she knew why they were there. ‘Greed,’ he said. ‘That’s all it is, my dear. Greed, stupidity and arrogance.’ Then he asked her where they were fighting now. She told him about the Battle of the Bulge. He kept repeating ‘the bulge, the battle of the bulge. And where is the bulge, my dear?’ She started to tell him. ‘Not geographically, silly child.’ Peggy was afraid of him then and got away as fast as she could. I think he spoke more sharply than he really meant to.”
    “Peggy’s not very smart anyway,” Alex said. “But then none of us are. Not one of us had the brains or heart to think about the old man until he was dead.” At the edge of the parking lot he stooped down to examine a path that began there and continued through the field toward the backs of the houses on Sunrise Avenue. “Wait here a moment for me, Joan.” He went to the car and got his flashlight. He threw its beam through the long grass, catching in its light pieces of the white gravel. “A car’s been through here lately,” he said. “I’d be willing to bet on it.”
    They followed the tracks. As they neared the shrubs they heard someone whistling for his dog. Alex switched off the light. Presently the whistling stopped and a door banged. Closer to them the chickens in a nearby coop had been disturbed. “No zoning laws over here,” he said. With the flashlight on again, he caught the glisten of grease on the grass tops. “I think whoever was in here turned the car around right here. If we’d had some rain there might be tracks, but this stuff’s hard as a straw mattress.”
    “We’re behind Mattson’s place, aren’t we?” Joan said.
    “Directly behind it.” They followed a path through the bushes past the door of Andy’s shack. For a moment he played the light on the back steps of the house. “Let’s see if the shack is open.” As they pushed the door open the smell of damp coal and wood reached them. Alex found a light switch at the side of the door. The sudden light blinded them for a moment. He closed the door. There were windows in the place, but they