"Sorry, old boy," he said. "That was a dirty trick." He carried Koko back to his apartment and set him gently on the floor. Yum Yum came running to touch noses, but Koko ignored her. He had a long drink of water, then stood on his hind legs and clawed Qwilleran's trousers. The man picked him up and walked the floor with him until it was time to leave for his next appointment.

Locking the cats in the apartment, he started for the stairway, but the long forlorn howl behind the closed door tore at his heart. As he went slowly down the stairs, the cries became louder and more piteous, and all Qwilleran's regrets about Koko's self-sufficiency vanished. The cat needed him. Inwardly elated, Qwilleran returned and gathered up his eager friend and took him to call on Cluthra.

18

With enticing interrogatives in her voice Cluthra had invited Qwilleran to come later (?) in the evening (?) when they could both relax (?). But he had pleaded another engagement and had played dumb to her innuendos.

Now at the discreet hour of seven thirty he and Koko took a taxi to Skyline Towers and a swift elevator to the seventeenth floor. Koko did not object to elevators that ascended — only the kind that sank beneath him.

Cluthra met them in a swirling cloud of pale green chiffon and ostrich feathers. "I didn't know you were bringing a friend," she said with her husky laugh.

"Koko has had a bad experience this evening, and he didn't want me to leave him." Qwilleran told her about Russell's cruel experiment with electronic music.

"Beware of young men dressed in white!" she said. "They've got something they're hiding." She ushered him into the cozy living room, which was done entirely in matching paisley — paisley fabric on the walls, paisley draperies, paisley slipcovers — all in warm tones of beige, brown and gold. The fabric gave the room the stifling hush of a closed coffin. Music was playing softly — something passionate, with violins. Cluthra's perfume was overpowering.

Qwilleran looked around him at the polliwogs that characterize the paisley pattern and tried to estimate their number. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Half a million?

"Will you have a drinkie?" Cluthra extended the invitation with a conspiratorial gleam in her green eyes. "Just a club soda. No liquor. Heavy on the ice." "Honey, I can do better than that for my favorite newspaper reporter," she said, and when the drink came, it was pink, sparkling, and heavily aromatic.

Qwilleran sniffed it and frowned. "Homemade chokecherry syrup," she explained. "Men like it because it's bitter." He took a cautious sip. The taste was not bad. Pleasant, in fact. "Did you make it?" "Lordy, no! One of my kooky customers. She's made a study of medicinal weeds, and she does this stuff with juniper, lovage, mullein, and I don't know what else. Mullein puts hair on your chest, lover," Cluthra added with a wink.

Qwilleran had taken a seat in a stiff pull-up chair, with Koko huddled on his lap.

"You've picked the only backbreaking chair in the place," she protested. She herself was now seductively arranged on the paisley sofa surrounded by paisley pillows, carefully concealing her walking cast with the folds of her chiffon gown. Yards of ostrich fluff framed her shoulders, cascaded down her hilly slopes and circled the hem.

She patted the sofa cushions. "Why don't you sit over here and be comfy?" "With this cranky knee I'm better off on a straight chair," Qwilleran said, and it was more or less true.

Cluthra regarded him with fond accusation. "You've been kidding us," she said. "You're not really a newspaper reporter. But we like you just the same." "If your kid sister has been spreading stories, forget it," he said. "I'm just an underpaid, overworked feature writer for the Fluxion, with a private curiosity about sudden deaths. Ivy has a wild imagination." "It's just a phase she's going through." "By the way, did you know Andy was writing a novel about Junktown?" "When Andy came over here," she said, relishing the memory, "we did very little talking about literature." "Do you know Hollis Prantz very well?" Cluthra rolled her eyes. "Preserve me from men who wear gray button-front sweaters!" Qwilleran gulped his iced drink. The apartment was warm, and Koko was like a fur lap robe. But as they talked, the cat relaxed and eventually slid to the floor, much to the man's relief. Soon Koko disappeared against the protective coloration of the beige and brown paisley. Qwilleran mopped his brow. He was beginning to suffocate. The temperature seemed to be in the nineties, and the polliwogs dazzled his eyes. He could look down at the plain beige carpet and see polliwogs; he could look up at the white ceiling and see polliwogs. He closed his eyes. "Do you feel all right, honey?" "Yes, I feel fine. My eyes are tired, that's all. And it's a trifle warm in here." "Would you like to lie down? You look kind of groggy. Come and lie down on the sofa." Qwilleran contemplated the inviting picture before him — the deep-cushioned sofa, the soft pillows. He also caught a glimpse of movement behind Cluthra's halo of red hair. Koko had risen silently and almost invisibly to the back of the sofa.

"Take off your coat and lie down and make yourself comfy," his hostess was urging. "You don't have to mind your manners with Cousin Cluthra." She gave his moustache and shoulders an appreciative appraisal and batted her lashes.

Qwilleran wished he had not come. He liked women who were more subtle. He hated paisley. His eyes had been I bothering him lately (maybe he needed glasses) and the allover pattern was making him dizzy. Or was it the drink?

He wondered about that cherry syrup. Juniper, mullein, lovage. What the devil was lovage? Then without warning Cluthra sneezed. "Oh! Excuse me!" Qwilleran took the opportunity to change the subject. "They'll be burying old C. C. tomorrow," he said with an attempt at animation, although he had an overwhelming desire to close his eyes.

"He was a real man," Cluthra said with narrowed eyes. "You don't find many of them any more, believe me!" She sneezed again. "Excuse me! I don't know what's the matter with me." Qwilleran could guess. Koko had his nose buried in her ostrich feathers. "Iris is taking it very hard," he said.

Cluthra pulled a chiffon handkerchief from some hidden place and touched her eyes, which were reddening and beginning to stream. "Iris wod't have ady bore ghostly problebs with her glasses," she said. "C. C. used to get up id the dight to play tricks with theb." "That's what I call devotion," Qwilleran said. "Look here! Are you by any chance allergic to cat hair?" The visit ended abruptly, and it was with a great sense of escape that Qwilleran got out in the cold air and shook the polliwogs from his vision.

Cluthra had called after him, "You bust visit be without your buddy dext tibe." He took Koko home and got into his scrounging clothes for his next appointment. But first he looked up a word in the dictionary. "Lovage — a domestic remedy." For what ailment or deficiency, the book did not say. Qwilleran also opened a can of shrimp and gave Koko a treat, and he spent a certain amount of time thinking about Cluthra's voice. Whiskey voice, they used to call it.

At the appointed hour he found Ben waiting at the curb in a gray station wagon that was a masterpiece of rust, with a wire coat hanger serving as a radio antenna and with the curbside headlight, anchored by a single screw, staring glumly at the gutter. The driver was bundled up in a mackinaw, early aviator's helmet, and long striped muffler. The motor coughed a few times, the car shuddered and lurched away from the curb, sucking up blasts of icy cold and dampness through a gaping hole under the dashboard. Fortunately it was a short drive to the Garrick Theatre in the demolition area.