“Why not?”
“Well,” Cassie said, “I’m getting uneasy. There’s simply no telling who will drop in next. Or what will happen. I feel harried.”
“Which,” Leonidas said, “is the way we are supposed to feel. Someone wishes that we would either tell about Medora, or else get thoroughly scared and clear out entirely. We’re not going to do either.”
“Bill, Jock’s not being here isn’t going to fool anyone about your surprise.”
“Even small babes,” Leonidas said, “seem to have figured that out. Even Elsa. M’yes. Come along, Cassie. I want to ask Cuff something.”
“Oh, dear! Cuff is another problem. He’s confused.”
“About the body?”
“Oh, no,” Cassie said. “I don’t think he’s given that a second thought. You know how he is. Sort of Oriental about bodies. What’s a body more or less— My, I wish I could feel that way! It’s about Leslie. She confuses him.”
“You never tried to tell her story to Cuff!”
“No. Oh, heavens, no! But Cuff got the impression that if you had a beautiful girl with luggage rushing around outside your house, dropping lipsticks in an intimate manner, she was your wife. Cuff is terribly moral about some things. Now he finds she isn’t your wife, and he thinks you’re both utterly abandoned. Explain to him very slowly that you’re not. I do wish,” she added, “that Margie would come back from her sister’s. Cuff really needs her for an interpreter.”
“M’yes,” Leonidas said. “Cassie, how did that boy pass his police exams?”
“Wasn’t it marvelous?” Cassie smiled brightly. “He was so pleased. He’d set his heart on being a cop, and he just worked so hard! When they get a thousand dollars saved up, he and Margie are going to get married. They’d have been all set last month, but Cuff took his bank-robber reward and put it on a horse named Marlene, in a weak moment. Now, explain to him about Leslie.”
In words of one syllable, Leonidas explained to Cuff that Miss Horn was not his wife, but simply someone who happened to be passing by at the moment.
“There, see?” Cassie said. “Dow is going to marry her. D’you understand?”
“Where’d he meet her?” Cuff wanted to know.
“He hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge,” Leslie said. “Bill, here’s your food. Look, can’t we just say that I’m single, and Bill’s single, and leave it at that? This matrimonial project you have in mind for me—”
“Oh, now you’ve got him looking reproachful again!” Cassie said. “Just as he was beginning to get it. Oh, well—Bill, what did you want to ask Cuff about?”
“This.” Leonidas indicated the red refrigerator.
Cuff brightened. If people had to talk about things, he preferred things you could point at.
“That’s a wow,” he said with admiration that approached reverence. “That’s a swell icebox, Bill. I’m going to get Margie an icebox like that. Only green. She likes green.”
“Green is pretty,” Leonidas said. “Now, Cuff, d’you know anything about the icebox racket?”
“You mean, a guy fixes up an old icebox, and paints it, and then talks somebody with a new icebox into thinking they-got the wrong icebox, and then takes the new one and gives ‘em the repaint. You mean like that?”
“Exactly,” Leonidas said. “Do you know anything about it?”
“Sure, I used to work it with Slim O’Leary. I used to fix them up and carry ‘em, and Slim did the chatter. Poor Slim! I tried to be a pal. I told him the colonel’d get him, and he better move on to Carnavon, but he wouldn’t, and the colonel did. The colonel got him on the grass, too.”
“What grass?”
“You know,” Cuff said, “you see a guy’s house needs a lawn, and you say you got sod, and does he wants some, and he says yes, and then you go to the nearest golf club and get some—”
“Cuff!” Cassie said. “Did you know the wretches who stole the seventh hole? You did! It cost the club three thousand to replace the turf, Bill. They were insured, of course, but Rutherford’s on the Greens Committee, and he was simply fit to be tied.”
“Yeah,” Cuff said. “Poor Slim. That’s why he got such a stretch. The colonel was plenty sore. But I got taken off that Daltondale beat, and up one place on the list.”
“His first up,” Cassie said brightly. “Isn’t that marvelous? I told Rutherford that Cuff would be a help. He—er—do let me get you some more eggs, Bill. Don’t you want some more eggs? They’re fresh. I told my own egg man to come here. He has the brownest eggs in Dalton. I like brown eggs best, don’t you? Do have some more!”
“Thank you, no,” Leonidas said. “No more eggs.” At some later date, he intended to discuss the origin and source of the inspiration for the removal of the seventh hole. Cuff never had thought that up by himself. “Cuff, who runs the icebox racket now that Slim is temporarily incommunicado?”
“Huh?”
“Who took on the icebox racket after Slim got put in jail? Who carries on?”
“Aw, nobody,” Cuff said. “Not in this town. Not after what Slim got. And listen, Bill, you needn’t never think nobody’d bother you, see? About that icebox, or nothing. Everybody knows you’re a pal of mine, see? And the colonel’s, too. Nobody wouldn’t never try nothing on you. They wouldn’t have the nerve, see?”
Cassie bestowed no more than a passing glance on the glass coffeepot that had slipped from her hands and shattered on the floor.
“Bill, aren’t you smart! The icebox man wasn’t a racket, was he? The brush man was real, because he sold you a whole set, like mine, and nothing happened while he was here. But the icebox man wasn’t a racket at all—he was trying to get inside the house! Did he have one? Was it red?”
“If you mean, did he actually have a red refrigerator about his person,” Leonidas said, “I don’t know. I didn’t see one. Nor do I remember either hearing
