“Gee, how’d you do that?”
“Sh-h-h. A guy showed me how. You better get your cat and scram.”
Golly, I wonder, maybe the guy is a burglar, and that gives me another creepy feeling. But would a burglar be taking time out to get a kid’s cat free?
“Well, thanks for the cat. See you around,” I say.
“Sh-h-h. I don’t live around here. Hurry up, before we both get caught.”
Maybe he’s a real burglar with a gun, even, I think, and by the time I dodge past the elevators and get out in the cold April wind, the sweat down my back is freezing. I give Cat a long lecture on staying out of basements. After all, I can’t count on having a burglar handy to get him out every time.
Back home we put some nice jailhouse blues on the record player, and we both stretch out on the bed to think. The guy didn’t really look like a burglar. And he didn’t talk “dese and dose.” Maybe real burglars don’t all talk that way—only the ones on TV. Still, he sure picked that lock fast, and he was sure down in that cellar for some reason of his own.
Maybe I ought to let someone know. I figure I’ll test Pop out, just casual like. “Some queer-looking types hanging around this neighborhood,” I say at dinner. “I saw a tough-looking guy hanging around Number Forty-six this afternoon. Might have been a burglar, even.”
I figure Pop’ll at least ask me what he was doing, and maybe I’ll tell him the whole thing—about Cat and the cage. But Pop says, “In case you didn’t know it, burglars do not all look like Humphrey Bogart, and they don’t wear signs.”
“Thanks for the news,” I say and go on eating my dinner. Even if Pop does make me sore, I’m not going to pass up steak and onions, which we don’t have very often.