Read Online The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online Page B

place, and their place happens to be your apartment. Carolyn, believe me, I don’t want a pet. I’m not the type. If I can’t even keep a steady girlfriend, how can I keep a pet?”
    “Pets are easier,” she said with feeling. “Believe me. Anyway, this cat’s not a pet.”
    “Then what is it?”
    “An employee,” she said. “A working cat. A companion animal by day, a solitary night watchman when you’re gone. A loyal, faithful, hardworking servant.”
    “Miaow,” the cat said.
    We both glanced at the cat carrier, and Carolyn bent down to unfasten its clasps. “He’s cooped up in there,” she said.
    “Don’t let him out.”
    “Oh, come on,” she said, doing just that. “We’re not talking Pandora’s Box here, Bern. I’m just letting him get some air.”
    “That’s what the air holes are for.”
    “He needs to stretch his legs,” she said, and the cat emerged and did just that, extending his front legs and stretching, then doing the same for his rear legs. You know how cats do, like they’re warming up for a dance class.
    “He,” I said. “It’s a male? Well, at least it won’t be having kittens all the time.”
    “Absolutely not,” she said. “He’s guaranteed not to have kittens.”
    “But won’t he run around peeing on things? Like books, for instance. Don’t male cats make a habit of that sort of thing?”
    “He’s post-op, Bern.”
    “Poor guy.”
    “He doesn’t know what he’s missing. But he won’t have kittens, and he won’t father them, either, or go nuts yowling whenever there’s a female cat in heat somewhere between Thirty-fourth Street and the Battery. No, he’ll just do his job, guarding the store and keeping the mice down.”
    “And using the books for a scratching post. What’s the point of getting rid of mice if the books all wind up with claw marks?”
    “No claws, Bern.”
    “Oh.”
    “He doesn’t really need them, since there aren’t a lot of enemies to fend off in here. Or a whole lot of trees to climb.”
    “I guess.” I looked at him. There was something strange about him, but it took me a second or two to figure it out. “Carolyn,” I said, “what happened to his tail?”
    “He’s a Manx.”
    “So he was born tailless. But don’t Manx cats have a sort of hopping gait, almost like a rabbit? This guy just walks around like your ordinary garden-variety cat. He doesn’t look much like any Manx I ever saw.”
    “Well, maybe he’s only part Manx.”
    “Which part? The tail?”
    “Well—”
    “What do you figure happened? Did he get it caught in a door, or did the vet get carried away? I’ll tell you, Carolyn, he’s been neutered and declawed and his tail’s no more than a memory. When you come right down to it, there’s not a whole lot of the original cat left, is there? What we’ve got here is the stripped-down economy model. Is there anything else missing that I don’t know about?”
    “No.”
    “Did they leave the part that knows how to use a litter box? That’s going to be tons of fun, changing the litter every day. Does he at least know how to use a box?”
    “Even better, Bern. He uses the toilet.”
    “Like Archie and Ubi?” Carolyn had trained her own cats, first by keeping their litter pan on top of the toilet seat, then by cutting a hole in it, gradually enlarging the hole and finally getting rid of the pan altogether. “Well, that’s something,” I said. “I don’t suppose he’s figured out how to flush it.”
    “No. And don’t leave the seat up.”
    I sighed heavily. The animal was stalking around my store, poking his head into corners. Surgery or no surgery, I kept waiting for him to cock a leg at a shelf full of first editions. I admit it, I didn’t trust the little bastard.
    “I don’t know about this,” I said. “There must be a way to mouseproof a store like this. Maybe I should talk it over with an exterminator.”
    “Are you kidding? You want some weirdo skulking around the aisles, spraying