Cat In A White Tie And Tails

How wonderful to have all the social murmurs and palavers reduced to the hum of the refrigerator. Actually, refrigerators mimic major digestive upsets nowadays, have you noticed that? They do so many tricks with ice and water and defrosting and burping like Tupperware that one is tempted to throw Pepto-Bismol at their stainless steel faces. That would be like topping the Taj Mahal with strawberry sauce.

Anyway, I am in official search and seizure mode, accompanied by a canny glaze of lying-in-wait.

No one here had noticed that I noticed that Miss Matt Mama had kept the noxious threatening notes in a folder in her bottom dresser drawer, so as to keep Miss Krys’s nosy nose out of them.

Drawers might be an obstacle for one of my limited digital dexterity, but my primal brain knows how they work, so off to work I go.

First I flip onto my back. Then I drag my muscular torso beneath the drawer under siege by planting all sixteen of my built-in pitons in the feeble wallboard people use as mass-produced furniture these days.

No way would I have been able to perform this feat on, say, Sam Spade’s desk. Those days produced men and file cabinets of steel and noggins and drawers of walnut, as in “hard walnut to crack.”

Now, my motions as I shimmy under the drawer bottom might be adult-rated but we are all friends here. Once in position, I start driving my leg pitons into the wall-to-wall carpet, pushing with my mitts. The resulting push-pull action inches the drawer forward. In a thrice—well, after several full body rolls—I can wriggle out from under the dresser, snag a few shivs inside the drawer’s now-ajar gap and wrestle the insert out.

Okay. It takes me about five times longer than some light-fingered career criminal to open a drawer, but they have the weight and opposable thumb advantage.

Once in, working out the papers in question is kit’s play, nothing any curious puppy could not accomplish with three brain cells. Leaving them unchewed, priceless.

I use my main four-finger shiv to spread the missives out like a hand of playing cards.

I have been known to decipher printed matter, but human handwriting is a tougher problem. I recognize the messages are formed of that old crime story staple, individual letters in different type fonts cut out from that disappearing artifact of contemporary life, the daily newspaper.