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I have published over 75 short stories and poems in various print and online publications including Flesh & Blood, AlienSkin, Dark Krypt, and Decompositions. I am a founding member and past vice-president and secretary of the Garden State Horror Writers, an organization of writers of all genres based in Manalapan, N.J., and am editor of a print anthology published by that group titled Dark Notes From NJ (2005). I am also author of a joke book, Purring Elephants and Killer Coconuts, available now from Renaissance Books. The Hat In The Cat by Harrison Howe
I killed the old man's hat on the same day I killed the old man, and to my credit, managed not to lose my mind doing it. And before you say something like, "You can't kill a hat, it's an inanimate object," let me tell you the whole thing. Then you'll see it like I did. That hat was as much alive as the old man who lived under it; his personality just seeped into the fabric until you couldn't tell where the hat left off and the old man began.
You think I'm crazy, don't you? I can tell. You and a whole lot of other people. And maybe I am, now. But I wasn't then. I swear it.
I had all my wits about me when I slipped the curare––I paid, handsomely, a chemistry student from the nearby University to get it for me––into the insufferable old fool's morning coffee. I had all my marbles while I watched the life ebb out of him. I kept my grip on sanity while I watched his toothless mouth gaping for air, that mouth from which had spilled endless stories that seemed so much hallucination. Not even looking at that silly hat cocked on his dead head made me snap, and that in itself was a feat (see paragraph one, you'll see why).
I think I hated that hat more than I hated the old man himself. You have to understand its significance to fully understand that, and my later actions. It was not an ordinary hat; not an ordinary weathered, beat-up fedora that the old man wore like a charm (and when he wasn't wearing it, it hung on a bedpost while he slept, or on the hook on the back of the bathroom door while he bathed, or on the back of his chair while he ate; I swear that thing was around so much he could have claimed it as a dependent on his tax forms). To me, it personified the wearer: old and worn out and worthless. When I saw it, I thought of him. Heard him, even; his silly senile rantings bouncing around in my head. His inane stories, his crazy fantasies. He claimed to be the most successful treasure hunter that ever lived, his adventures eclipsing those of Indiana Jones from those movies by Steven Spielberg, whose films I generally like a lot. The old man claimed to have survived desert treks, jungle fevers, marauding natives, ancient curses, voodoo hexes, CIA assassins, cannibals, haunted tombs, snakes and tigers and scorpions and bats and...well, you get the idea. All that was missing, it seemed, was the bullwhip.
How he would ramble on about the riches he had amassed! All of this while one gnarled hand stroked Buttons, his Calico that clung to him only slightly less than did that damned hat. Buttons, he said, was one of a lineage of felines that had accompanied him on these many journeys. The cats, and the hat, he often said, had stuck by him through thick and thin. More than he could say for his former wives, or his children, or many of his friends. "Even my hair," he often joked, running his hand over his bald pate.
"Only you," he would say to me, with so much sincerity it was all I could do not to laugh in his face. Like I gave a shit about the crazy old bastard. I was using him. The family tree wanted no more to do with me than they did with him. I was a black sheep, admittedly unambitious and lazy. With an on and off drinking problem, I admit. The old man let me stay in the house rent-free and asked nothing in return but that I take him meals when he felt too tired to come downstairs to the table. The bills got paid, the refrigerator stocked (he had it delievered, so that was one less task I needed to fulfill), I had use of his car if I needed it.
So I'd smile back and say, "You bet, Uncle Milt," just like that, and go back to listening how he wrestled crocs in Australia or saved an African village from a deadly elephant stampede.
There was not one shred of evidence that these stories held water. As far as I knew, he'd been a college professor for thirty-five years before retiring. If he'd found the lost Braganza, where was it? If he'd fought off a 400-pound tiger in the jungles of Nigeria with nothing but a pocket knife and an empty rifle, where was its stuffed head as a souvenir, or the scars I'm sure such a battle would have produced? If he'd been inside the Lost City of the Pharaohs, where was a photograph to prove it? The decor of the small house did not reflect a man who had journeyed the world a dozen times over, uncovering its lost treasures and facing down its worst dangers. It was a modest home in a modest neighborhood, and about the only thing he had that was worth anything was a rare Picasso reproduction that had been a gift from a fellow professor at the University.
I could not bear the thought of seeing him propped in his coffin at the funeral home in that hat. A shrink might say I transferred my hatred of the old man to that headwear (and the one who comes to see me twice a week probably has that jotted down in his notes I'm sure), or vice versa I suppose; to me, it came down to thinking of the two as one and the same.
I was going to burn it. I swiped it off the old man's lifeless head and was on my way out when Buttons rubbed against my shins, purring for dinner.
I looked at my watch. Almost five. Late day shadows puddled in the corners as the fading sun drained out of the sky.
"Yes, it's dinnertime, isn't it, Buttons?" I said, and that's when the idea came to me. The police could sift through ashes, couldn't they? And with investigative techniques as sophisticated as they were these days, couldn't they find bits of that hat amid those ashes? Suddenly I could see the meat grinder bolted to the butcher block table in the kitchen, the meat grinder that I had ground the old man's meat in every night at dinner so he could gum it down, could see it as clearly in my mind's eye as if I were standing before it.
Buttons sideswiped my shins again.
"How about some ground fedora Friskies?"
I clutched the old man's hat and for the first time in my life I actually cackled.
Didn't mean I was crazy.
There was no investigation, no autopsy; nothing. Who suspects foul play in the seemingly peaceful death of a 92-year-old man who lived alone in a modest home, discovered dead in bed by the great-nephew who had cared for him for the past six years? I'd calmly placed the call, handled the detective's questions with, I must say so myself (because who else would say it, ha ha?), confident ease, and had things wrapped up by noon.
The coroner took the body.
I took a nap.
And that should have been that. Might have been that. Except for Buford Coltraine.
***
Coltraine was out of Houston, Texas, and was the old goat's attorney for something like the past hundred years. I'd never met him, knew him only by the mail I saw come into the house, letterhead and envelopes and such. A personalized Christmas card every year. I never gave much thought to their correspondence, figuring the old man had established a relationship with the attorney years before and simply maintained contact. Maybe a former student from his teaching days.
I was shocked to discover the old coot had a will, and that I was summoned to its reading. I went, though I could not imagine what possibly had been left to me. That old house? His car, a twenty-year-old bomb? Most likely Buttons, though I had no interest in taking the animal. I hate cats.
"To Richard Kern, my longtime companion and the only soul in my last years on earth who provided me with any human contact, my sole living relative who has kept in any contact with me, whose company I always enjoyed, and to whom I am forever grateful, I leave my fortune."
I snickered, thinking: The only fortune you had was that dopey hat and those silly tales in your head, and that hat went out in the kitty litter a couple of weeks ago and those stories died when the curare stopped your tongue. I giggled at the thought, I couldn't help it. Coltraine looked up at me briefly, then continued.
"I leave my hat to you, Richard. My good luck hat, the hat I wore when I built my fortune, and now I pass the wealth on to you; the wealth, and the hat in which I left it. Sewn inside it's lining is a map, Richard. A map that will lead you to the whereabouts of ten million dollars that no other living human being knows the location of, and which I leave to you as my eternal thank you for your kindness, your generosity, your––"
Coltraine never finished. I snapped. Again, I know what you're thinking, but keep it to yourself.
Anyway, I went over the desk for his throat.
Two plainclothes detectives burst in and took me down.
***
I laugh sometimes, here in my cell. I sit and laugh when I think about it. I have a lot of time to think in here.
It was a setup. There was a fortune, yes. Coltraine knew it; it was he who kept the riches under lock and key. So when Coltraine notified the police about that, the cops put me under suspicion. I had, after all, told them that the old man was of modest means. How could I not know that the man was a millionaire ten times over? they wondered. I'd lived with the man for six years. So they set me up with this staged reading. And it worked, I gotta hand them that. My hat's off to them, you might say. Although don't tell them I said so. Keep it under your hat, har de har har.
So I get life. And that's that.
What became of the fortune, you wonder?
The old man's real will was short and to the point: "All monies will be left to my only companion in life who has meant anything to me, whose ancestors stuck with me through generations of peril and adventure, who on two occasions did nothing less than save my life, and whose loyalty must be rewarded."
So Buttons is a millionaire, and I'm here in this four-by-six cell.
Geez, you just gotta laugh. You just gotta.
Don't you?
THE END
Harrison Howe © 2007 |