Read The Cat Who Turned on and Off for Free Online

your loud mouth!”
    “I’ll give you three.” Qwilleran threw some bills on the bar.
    Cobb scooped them up and filed them in hisbillfold. “Well, there’s more than one way to skin a sucker,” he said with a leer at the other customers.
    Qwilleran opened the book he had bought. It was The Works of the Reverend Dr. Ishmael Higginbotham, Being a Collection of Interesting Tracts Explaining Several Important Points of the Divine Doctrine, Set Forth with Diligence and Extreme Brevity.
    Mrs. Cobb burst into the room. “Did you let that dirty old man bully you into buying something?”
    “Shut up, old lady,” said her husband.
    She had put on a pink dress, fixed her hair, and applied make-up, and she looked plumply pretty. “Come upstairs with me,” she said sweetly, putting a friendly hand on Qwilleran’s arm. “We’ll have a cozy cup of coffee and let Cornball Cobb fume with jealousy.”
    Mrs. Cobb started up the creaking staircase, her round hips bobbling from side to side and the backs of her fat knees bulging in a horizontal grin. Qwilleran was neither titillated nor repelled by the sight, but rather saddened that every woman was not blessed with a perfect figure.
    “Don’t pay any attention to C.C.,” she said over her shoulder. “He’s a great kidder.”
    The spacious upstairs hall was a forest of old chairs, tables, desks, and chests. Several doors stood open, revealing dingy living quarters.
    “Our apartment is on that side,” said Mrs. Cobb, indicating an open door through which came a loud radio commercial, “and on this side we have twosmaller apartments. Ben Nicholas rents the front, but the rear is nicer because it has a view of the backyard.”
    Qwilleran looked out the hall window and saw two station wagons backed in from the alley, an iron bed, a grindstone, the fender from a car, some wagon wheels, an old refrigerator with no door, and a wooden washing machine with attached clothes wringer—most of them frozen together in a drift of dirty ice and snow.
    “Then how come Nicholas lives in the front?” he asked.
    “His apartment has a bay window, and he can keep an eye on the entrance to his shop, next door.”
    She led the way into the rear apartment—a large square room with four tall windows and a frightening collection of furniture. Qwilleran’s gaze went first to an old parlor organ in jaundiced oak—then a pair of high-backed gilded chairs with seats supported by gargoyles—then a round table, not quite level, draped with an embroidered shawl and holding an oil lamp, its two globes painted with pink roses—then a patterned rug suffering from age and melancholy—then a crude rocking chair made of bent twigs and treebark, probably full of termites.
    “You do like antiques, don’t you?” Mrs. Cobb asked anxiously.
    “Not especially,” Qwilleran replied in a burst of honesty. “And what is that supposed to be?” He pointed to a chair with tortured iron frame, elevated on a pedestal and equipped with headrest and footrest.
    “An old dentist’s chair—really quite comfortable for reading. You can pump it up and down with your foot. And the painting over the fireplace is a very good primitive.”
    With a remarkably controlled expression on his face, Qwilleran studied the lifesize portrait of someone’s great-great-grandmother, dressed in black—square-jawed, thin-lipped, steely-eyed, and disapproving all she surveyed.
    “You haven’t said a word about the daybed,” said Mrs. Cobb with enthusiasm. “It’s really unique. It came from New Jersey.”
    The newsman turned around and winced. The daybed, placed against one wall, was built like a swan boat, with one end carved in the shape of a long-necked bad-tempered bird and the other end culminating in a tail.
    “Sybaritic,” he said drily, and the landlady went into spasms of laughter.
    A second room, toward the front of the house, had been subdivided into kitchenette, dressing room, and bath.
    Mrs. Cobb said, “C.C.