Murder Has Its Points by Frances and Richard Lockridge Page B

began to purr loudly. Stilts licked her, perfunctorily. Shadow licked back with eager excitement. Stilts turned slightly and hit Shadow in the face. Shadow laid her ears back and leaped into an embrace with Stilts. It seemed to Pam, watching, that Stilts sighed. Unquestionably, Stilts pushed. Shadow began to cry on a quite different note—in the tone of a cat about to eat another cat for breakfast.
    Stilts, with a sudden flowing movement, stood up and knocked Shadow down. Then she sat and began to wash behind the ears. Shadow looked at her. Shadow sat and washed behind the ears.
    â€œYou poor dear,” Pam said to Shadow, “are you going to be a kitten always?”
    Shadow leaped to Pam’s lap and Pam stroked her. It was a bit, Pam thought, like stroking an eel only, of course, furrier. Shadow purred. By decibels the loudest purrer we’ve ever had, Pam thought, and said, “Nice baby.”
    Stilts watched for a moment. She lay down on the carpet again, and this time put one paw over her eyes.
    No two of them are ever alike, Pam thought. She pressed the proper area of remote control and Dave Garroway, still looking frightened, vanished. Which was odd when one considered how much alike these two seal-points looked. Shadow’s eyes were perceptibly larger and, for that matter, bluer. She was a long, low cat, shaped a good deal—a good deal too much, if one chose to be critical—like a dachshund. (This comparison was never made, audibly, in her presence.) Shadow was constantly losing something, usually Stilts, and mourning loudly. People who were always talking of the detached self-reliance of cats should meet Shadow. If, of course, Shadow could, on encountering strangers, be got out from underneath whatever was nearest.
    Shadow was almost a year old, and at a year a cat is a cat, ready to follow a cat’s trade. In the country, that summer, Shadow had pursued, and missed, butterflies. Stilts, who was a little over two, had brought home moles, mice, chipmunks and a medium-sized rabbit. (The one, it was to be hoped, who had got under the fence and eaten the lettuce or, at the least, a near relative of the one.)
    Stilts was a cat who walked tall; she was, save for slightly crossed eyes, everything a Siamese ought to be. She had been given to the Norths by a sympathetic veterinarian, who—Pam suspected with the Norths in mind—had accepted her from owners who explained that they were ordered to Argentina. All the veterinarian knew of her was that she was a pretty, friendly cat. One of the things he did not know about her was that she was pregnant and another that she had not been inoculated.
    When she returned from the hospital, a wraith, after parturition and enteritis, in that order, she found Shadow—then nameless; then of a shape and texture which had almost led to her being called Cushion—under a sofa. “Larger than I would have expected,” Stilts clearly thought, “but one of my kittens.” Stilts, who had evidently been fearless from the day she was born, enticed Shadow from under, explained that cats do not need to hide from people and washed her thoroughly. She earned a slave who was sometimes clearly a nuisance, but one to be tolerated by a gentle cat. Her slave, who had been on order when Stilts was offered, had a long pedigree and quite perceptible tabby markings on her rather thickish tail.
    â€œThe baby,” Pam North said, fondly, to the ecstatic purrer on her lap. The telephone rang. Stilts jumped up instantly and danced away to answer it. Shadow, watching her, wailed at this new desertion.
    The voice was very low, almost husky. It was carefully controlled—so carefully, Pam thought, as to have in its texture a certain unreality. Pam said, “Why, of course. Whenever you like,” and listened a moment longer and said, “That’ll be fine,” and put the receiver back. For a moment she sat at the telephone table and looked at