The Cat Bell Rang
A shameless homage to Rex Stout’s angry mystery novel about J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the 1960s, “The Door Bell Rang.” I’ve kept the iconic 1950s setting of many of the classic Nero Wolf and Archie Goodwin novels, but shifted the location from Manhattan to Washington, D.C.
Our two curious cats, Archie and Neera, first met Leela[1] in “Little Leela Lost” and Chad[2] in “Finding Chad.”
Apologies to any real Animal Control officers, who do wonderful work— this story only seems to be about you.
“Honestly, these Neighborhood Association people are starting to annoy me,” grumbled Elise Neilert as she gathered the Saturday mail from the rug near the front door.
“Yes, dear?” was the muffled response from the closet where her husband rummaged for the dog leash.
“Just look at this latest list of rules,” Elise continued. “In addition to last month’s ‘no pets without leashes and tags’ edict, the new ones include ‘animals may be picked up by Animal Control without written warnings to the owners; no unaccompanied children outside after 8:00 p.m.; no excessive noise after 10:00 p.m.’”, she read with distaste. “It’s like being at a bad boarding school.”
Jack Neilert emerged from the closet to comment. “They’re almost certainly within their legal rights, Elise. That’s what happens when only fanatics run for things like the N.A. board.” Now that he had the dog leash, all he needed was the dog to complete this chore before the televised kickoff at noon.
Chad, a large dog of very little brain, had grasped that walk time was nigh. He romped up to the man-person to be hooked up, then headed for the front door on his own initiative.
“Be careful; don’t let him run loose,” was Elise’s parting comment as the door closed. She couldn’t imagine how distressed their neighbor, Mr. Piklovsky, would be should Chad get picked up off the street. Outside, the Animal Control van was patrolling, as it always seemed to be doing.
Chad had been staying with the Neilerts longer than the expected two weeks while Piklovsky recuperated from a dramatic incident on their front lawn. The charm of dog-sitting was beginning to wear thin. The brownstone house, just big enough for the Neilerts and their two felines, Archie and Neera, was straining to accommodate an adolescent Labrador.
Resentments simmered among all of the four-footed residents. Archie especially resented Chad’s twice- daily walks with her man-person. She barely ever got to the park these days. Chad, for his part, felt keenly the exclusionary rules that kept him off the couch but allowed Archie and Neera free rein to any furniture they could reach by jumping. He resented even more deeply the fact that Archie often used him as a springboard for her more ambitious leaps.
“The Animal Control people must be falling behind on their quota,” sniffed Elise half an hour later as the van cruised their street again. She received no answer, since her husband was fiddling with the television antenna to improve reception of the game. Chad offered a sympathetic woof to fill the gap.
Undeterred, Elise continued. “It has turned into quite a little operation. Any animal picked up has to be “redeemed” by paying a fine. And that’s if they condescend to seek out and contact the owners!”
With a final, annoyed flick of her dust cloth, she turned to head back to the kitchen, knowing that there would be no conversation with Jack until halftime. That’s why she did not see with her own eyes whatever caused the sudden onset of shrill barking from outside. Chad attempted the forbidden leap to the couch cushion to see, yapping all the while. Normally, Archie would have been there ahead of him, but she had vanished under the couch.
It took the combined efforts of both humans to restrain the frantic canine. Jack offered to keep petting Chad, a transparent attempt to continue watching the game, while Elise wondered where their normally curious cats were.
“You know, Jack, Archie has been running off to hide an awful lot lately. Do you think she’s scared of the patrol vans?”
An opportune timeout allowed Jack to give this full consideration. “I wouldn’t be surprised. She had been living on the streets and in the park for weeks before I found her. She must have been good at avoiding them.”
Meanwhile, Chad had calmed down enough to need reassurance of a different kind. The three animals had established some basic communication in the past few weeks. Chad knew that if thinking or action were required, Neera was the cat to seek out. Maintaining her status as senior cat in the household involved napping for hours in the finest sunlit position the house offered. Chad knew where to find her.
“They just took Molly off the street. I know her; I know her bark. She lives with the Kleinschmidts, she’s not a stray. How could they take her?” Chad repeated this a few times to make his point.
Neera opened one eye and saw that Chad was trembling, though from fear or indignation, she couldn’t tell. “They are only supposed to pick up animals without collars or tags. Don’t the Kleinschmidts have a tag on her collar?” Chad shook his large and largely empty head sorrowfully. He didn’t know.
“I know. Molly did have a collar.” Neera and Chad turned to see Archie. Curiosity had won out over her anxiety. She just had to know what Chad and Neera were talking about. When asked to explain, Archie added that the last thing she had seen as she fled the back of the living room couch was a collar tossed in the shrubs in front of their house.
Neera formulated a plan, relayed it to her operatives, and went back to sleep. Chad had never been an operative before, sort of surprising since he was owned by a Soviet diplomat. Archie breezily reviewed the scheme with him.
“The next time our man-person takes you for a ‘constitutional’, whatever that means, stick your snout in the shrubs and pull out that collar. Give it to him and bark until he takes a good look at it. Do you have that?” Archie saw Chad nod but had her doubts.
Immediately after dinner, Jack rose, stretched, retrieved the dog leash and found Chad at the door, more than ready to go. Three minutes later, they were back in the house, bearing not one but two collars. One, as expected, had Molly’s name on an engraved tag. The other, much smaller fabric collar bore a small, silver bell.
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The Neilerts stared at the collars. Chad still had to be taken for a walk, but how the heck did these collars end up in their bushes?
Neera and Archie were less confused. Chad had witnessed the AC “officers” ditching the evidence that these pets were not, in fact, ownerless strays. The presence of the cat collar disturbed them all.
“Leela wears a bell. It never bothers her, because she barely hears it, but it gives the birds a fighting chance to escape her. For a hearing impaired animal, she’s an amazing mouser,” Neera mused respectfully. Everybody but Leela heard her bell if her wanderings took her near the Neilert property.
“Can we find out if it is Leela’s collar?” Archie had no idea what this might involve, but had a lot of confidence in Neera.
Neera harrumphed and rose from her evening spot. She jumped up on the table where the two collars lay, masking her little grunt of effort. Archie vaulted up with no apparent effort at all.
“See, here are marks that give the name of the cat or maybe the owner. We need to get one of the persons to read the collar,” Neera concluded. Both cats accomplished this together by setting up a sustained howl that brought the lady-person from the kitchen and man-person from his office.
The desired result ensued. Both of the Neilerts knew Leela, knew of her auditory impairment, knew which neighbor’s house she belonged to. In fact, they were surprised that there wasn’t an uproar already, but many cat owners routinely put their cats out at night. Leela’s absence might not be noted until morning.
“Will that be too late?” asked Archie. Neera grunted again as she jumped back to the floor.
“We can hope that the Simpsons will rescue Leela before anything bad happens, though she’ll be very frightened all the same,” Neera offered before continuing. “It makes me wonder how many such incidents have there been? Here are two pet-nappings, right in front of this one house. How many more might there be?”
Archie, of course, had no answer. She left Neera to ponder, tail slowly swishing back and forth, a sure sign that the senior cat was thinking terribly hard.
Morning brought the usual chores for the humans in the house, including a walk for Chad. Chad had fresh orders from Neera.
“Don’t take no for an answer. You have to drag the man-person across to the park for your walk, and you have to look for as many collars as you can find. Were you able to get a scent from either of these collars?” Neera helpfully pushed the collars to the floor for Chad’s perusal. He nodded.
Chad therefore found his leash, barked his way into the kitchen and dragged the man-person outside with far less ceremony than usual. They lurched across the street to the park, where Chad dragged his temporary guardian from shrub to bush, from trash basket to gutter, for a quarter hour. When they returned home, Jack held a garland of dog and cat collars in his two hands, barely keeping his grip on Chad.
“Jack, they stink,” Elise complained as he dropped them to the table in the breakfast nook.
“Well, something stinks, that’s for sure,” he responded, his face a lot darker than it had been. “Something rotten is going on here, and I’m going to find out what.”
Chad joined Archie and Neera in flopping down on the kitchen rug. They had done their part; now it was up to the persons.
After a visit down the street to the Simpsons, the Neilerts instigated their plan. Mr. Simpson was an attorney and while animals didn’t have any defensible rights, their owners did. He was checking up on potentially broken statutes while Elise called a journalist friend.
“The Neighborhood Association is abusing their own rules. They’re picking up animals that have owners, homes and collars, then ditching the evidence. They keep a few of the collars so they can extort money from the owners, but I fear that many of the animals don’t survive long in animal control custody. These people just don’t like animals and don’t think anyone else should enjoy what they don’t understand.”
By noon that day, officers from the police department were coming to collect the Neilerts’ evidence. Hopefully, they would find more, to make a case that an implausible number of fleeing pets had slipped their collars while evading the so-called law. It might depend on whether the police had pets of their own and could empathize with the pet owners.
Later that week, Mr. Piklovsky telephoned to say that he would be returning home within a day or two and would love for Chad to come home, ending the lab’s brief but valiant career as an operative.
Weeks later, Neera was able to relay to Archie that the Neighborhood Association had abandoned their “clean up the streets” campaign. Leela’s owners not only recovered their deaf kitty before anything truly terrifying happened to her, but also sued the Animal Control for a tidy sum, enough to endow a small shelter for true strays in need.
[1] https://medium.com/@bjatwarog/little-leela-lost-68403bcdb935, “Little Leela Lost.”
[2] https://medium.com/@bjatwarog/finding-chad-13718153ab6c?sharedUserId=bjatwarog
