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everybody around outranked him, and his tongue was sore from saying “sir.”
    â€œSo you just walked in,” Mullins said, to a man with little hair on his head, and bristling gray eyebrows making up for this lack. The man wore a tweed jacket in which red predominated, slacks which were somewhat greenish, and a blue sports shirt without a necktie. “Just walked in and found him dead.”
    â€œDying,” the man said. He had told Sergeant Mullins he was Dr. Oscar Gebhardt, which Mullins regarded as a likely story. He had said that death occurred within a few minutes of the time of his arrival.
    â€œAnd,” Mullins said, “you say you came to give what you call rejuvenation shots to a—a cat .”
    It was really the cat part of it which preyed on Mullins’s mind. The rest could be endured; would have to be endured. Even saying “sir” to some young squirt from the precinct. But cats were too much. For Sergeant Mullins, cats are always too much. And it sometimes seems to him that he is dogged by cats.
    â€œHow many times?” Dr. Oscar Gebhardt said, and his manner bristled like his eyebrows.
    â€œMister,” Mullins said, “as often as I want you to.”
    Which was not like Mullins on an ordinary day, and an ordinary case—a case without cats in it. Mullins normally treats the public with the courtesy stipulated in the Manual of Procedure. This is true even when the public wears sports shirts—in the city and on Sunday.
    â€œI,” Gebhardt said, “have calls to make. Already I’ve been held up for—” He looked at his watch. “For almost three hours,” he said. “I have an appointment in White Plains at twelve.” He looked at his watch again. “Which was an hour ago,” he said.
    Mullins said that that was too bad, and spoke in a tone without conviction. He said he was afraid the cat in White Plains would have to wait. Or horse or whatever.
    Gebhardt sighed deeply. He said he had already explained that he specialized in cats. “Haven’t touched a horse in years,” he added. “I resent your attitude.”
    That, also, was too bad. “Once more, from the beginning,” Mullins said. “You say it was about ten?”
    They were in one of the smaller rooms of an apartment the like of which Mullins had supposed to have vanished from Manhattan, even from the old apartment houses on Riverside Drive. (The smaller room was approximately eighteen feet by twenty, which made it cozy. There were ten rooms in the apartment, all but two of them larger. Why, long ago, the thing hadn’t been split up into—)
    â€œSuppose, sergeant, you listen this time,” Dr. Gebhardt said. He pointed the index finger of his right hand at Mullins for emphasis. The index finger had a plastic bandage on it. So did the ring finger. There was a somewhat larger bandage on Dr. Gebhardt’s left wrist. “You want me to prove all over again who I am? Oscar Gebhardt, doctor of veterinary surgery. Graduate of Cornell. My office on Park Avenue is at—”
    â€œWe’ll see,” Mullins said. “All you’ve got to show is a driver’s license. You say there are hundreds of people who can identify you—prove you didn’t maybe lift the license from somebody. You say that on a Sunday in September most of them would, naturally, be out of town. You say—”
    â€œSergeant,” Gebhardt said, and his voice bristled now. “I listen, even if you don’t. I listen to what I say. Don’t stand there telling me what I say. Suppose—” He broke off. “All right,” he said. “I’m wasting my own time now. It was a few minutes after—”
    It had been almost exactly ten o’clock on this Sunday morning when Oscar Gebhardt, D.V.S., had parked his pale yellow Cadillac at the nearest point he could find to the apartment house on Riverside