Page 79 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Cat’s Paw

materials. Is any of this stuff worth anything to anybody? I sure don’t
think so. Maybe I can sell it by the pound to a junkman. But you
people think there’s a golden needle in this rotten haystack? Fine, just
fine. Look.” She looked at her watch, but my eyes were already
glazing over at the vast quantities of—of everything imaginable
stacked in boxes on every horizontal surface and leaning crazily
against all four walls of the living room. “I’ve got another
appointment at three-thirty, so let’s try to make this fast.”
Say what, lady? I didn’t have to look at my watch. “Uh, do you
have any idea where I should start looking? I mean, is every room like
this?”
“Oh, yes, all except the kitchen and bathroom. He had some
phobia about contaminating his papers with household bacteria—or
was it the other way around? And the garage, of course, because he
had to have room for his car. That’s where he died, you know.”
I was still trying to grasp the potentially Herculean scale of my
task. Turning a hose on this Augean stable would have suited me just
fine. But all I really had a grip on were the forms of polite
conversation, at least for the moment. “Why, no, I didn’t, Mrs.
Lesley. Was he ill?”
“Call me Ruth,” she said, nervously kicking at a pile of file folders
and trade magazines pitched approximately at the angle of the Tower
of Pisa. “Not physically, ha-ha. It was a stupid accident, served him
right for being so damned uptight about burglars and vandals. He
stumbled and knocked himself senseless in the garage with the car
running. Police said the battery in his remote control for the garage-
door opener was just about dead, so he must have been going to
open it by hand after he started the car and discovered the remote
wouldn’t work. He had it all figured out, right? Go into the garage,
lock the door to the house behind him, lock himself into the car, start
it up, open the garage door electronically, pull out far enough to see
who might be out there on the street, then close the door and drive
off. Foolproof, or so he thought. Of course, the light in the garage
doesn’t go on automatically unless the door has just opened, so he
couldn’t see what he was doing once his little program got
interrupted. Neighbor called the police about an hour later.”
“Oh. I’m terribly sorry.”

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