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Read Ebook: Death and Taxes by Hartzell H A Dyas Illustrator
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Ebook has 240 lines and 32340 words, and 5 pages
Captain Wully twirled his mustache, which curled luxuriantly at either end and was of an improbable shade Jerry classified as Hunter's Pink. So was his beard. "What did you say her name was?"
"Heather Higgins."
"You sighed the second time you said it, too. I just wanted to be sure."
Jerry crossed to the unfinished canvas. "Hair like sunshine on slightly oxidized copper. Eyes blue like the sea where it meets the horizon on a summer day."
From the turbulence of the air current which marked Gertrude's passing, Jerry decided the invisible cat had been in a hurry.
Distinctly audible was a high pitched caterwauling. In addition, there was a sound that made Jerry's curly hair crawl--the baying of a wolf?
"I better look into this," Captain Wully muttered and dashed outside. As he reached the doorway, his figure melted into transparency, then into air.
Jerry loaded the crated paintings into his car and took them to the express office. They wouldn't sell--they never did. But he couldn't afford to pass up the chance that they might.
When he returned home, there was no sign of Captain Wully, only a few paper candy wrappers on the floor. He started to pick them up, but remembered he wanted to imprison a highlight on Heather Higgins's nose and forgot the papers.
Someone had been into his paints. A tube of Payne's gray had been pressed dry. The cap was off the gamboge, and a new tube of bice green had been squeezed in the middle. Nor had the intruder bothered to scrape the palette, which gleamed with puddles of color.
A dab of ivory, the hint of rose madder and a suspicion of cadmium yellow fused under his brush tip. Creative fury struck him, and he failed to notice a figure that paused at the outside front gate. The figure stooped, picked up something, then carefully scanned the inside walkway. Here, too, she picked up something. She stooped momentarily on the front porch, and again in the hallway.
Then Heather Higgins stood in the studio. Her gaze swept the floor, and she bent over to pick up a candy wrapper.
"You don't have to do that," Jerry said. "I was getting around to it--eventually."
She whirled to face him. Her eyes turned from azure to ultramarine. "You might tell me what's going on around here!"
"Thief?"
"Stealing Scotch whiskey and my new plaid skirt! But you made a mistake on the rum butter toffee. I trailed the wrappers."
The Scotch whiskey and rum toffee Jerry could see a reason for--but not the plaid skirt. "So help me, I'm innocent."
"So you're innocent!" She dashed to a corner behind the easel and snatched a plaid skirt from the floor.
"You'll just have to believe me. I had nothing to do with it."
"Oh no?"
"Look at me. Do I look like a criminal?"
As she looked her expression softened slightly, but she said, "I always picked the wrong picture in psychology tests. It's you innocent looking fellows that always turn out to be the crooks."
Jerry tried his best to look desperate. The result was too much for Heather Higgins, who laughed.
"Hold it," Jerry said. "I want to catch your eyes."
He grabbed his brush and made several quick strokes on the canvas.
"You are. And it'd look more like you if I didn't have to do it from memory."
"I borrowed her old man's Scotch, if that's what you're gettin' at. And if you think I enjoyed eatin' all that candy just to leave a trail--I hope I don't see another piece of candy for three hundred years."
"Just to satisfy my curiosity," Jerry pleaded, "where does the plaid skirt come in?"
"The MacGreggor tartan? I needed a kilt."
"All of a sudden you need a kilt. Why?"
"It's a long story. But first--" he reached into a cupboard and produced Jerry's safety razor--"do you mind if I borrow this? And where do you keep the scissors?"
It took fifteen minutes to locate the scissors.
"We were discussing a kilt," Jerry prompted.
"If a body kiss a body, need a body cry," sang Captain Wully's baritone.
But, eventually, Captain Wully and the scissors were seated at the table behind a round magnifying mirror. "It begins with Gertrude. You remember how she scooted through the studio this afternoon with a werewolf after her?"
"How stupid of me not to realize."
"I felt Gertrude needed help. I caught up with the werewolf and gave him a piece of my mind. 'Pretty small potatoes,' I says, 'when a werewolf chases cats. You must be pretty second-rate to have fallen so low. A regular lamb in wolf's clothing.' 'I'll have you know,' he says, 'I'm pretty hot stuff. Related to Dracula on my mammy's side, and to Frankenstein on my pappy's.'"
The scissors snipped rapidly, and bits of pink mustache littered the unswept floor.
"'A renegade,' I says. 'Your family must be awfully proud of you. Chasing cats!' Ouch--" as the scissors slipped. "I says, 'Where do you live?' And he says, 'Down the road a piece. I'm lapdog for an Indian princess.' 'I think,' I says, usin' my head real quick like, 'I better see you home and see what your mistress has to say about this.'"
The mustache having been whittled to a tailored toothbrush. Captain Wully started on his beard. "You should see her, laddie. A real Indian princess, left over from a Lovers Leap. Bein' four hundred years old, she's real aristocracy and doesn't mingle with younger ghosts, which is why I never seen her before. Myself, I'm three score and hardly in her class. Although I must say she took a shine to me. But Indian braves don't wear beards."
Captain Wully put down the razor and revealed that he too was beardless. "Sporran, silver buckles and all the fixin's I got in my sea-chest--but my kilt went down wi' my ship."
When Captain Wully realized Heather Higgins had taken the plaid skirt home, he was inconsolable.
Heather Higgins kept her appointment to sit next morning. She was greeted at the mailbox by a subdued young man, who hastily shoved in his pocket a letter promising drastic action in the matter of "tax liens against property situate, to wit, etc."
"The oddest thing has happened," she said.
And Jerry knew. "The plaid skirt is gone again."
She gave him a chilly look. "See here! For a young man who claims to know nothing about--"
"It's my handyman," he babbled. "My handyman's a kleptomaniac."
"Lem Butler's the only handyman in town. Don't try to tell me Lem--"
"Since the person concerned is progressing toward a cure, I can't mention names. Couldn't you let me pay for the skirt?" It took a lot of fast talking, and it took time--but he finally diverted her attention.
She was a patient model. He quickly blocked in the flowing waves of her hair. But a listening look had come over her. Jerry listened too.
"Funny thing about this house," he said. "When I first moved in, I used to think I heard bagpipes."
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