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Snoops

Janet Amalia Weinberg

    Edna whispered into the phone, “He’s listening.”
    “Who?” her sister asked.
    “Oh Harriet, you know very well who. The Snoop.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I know.” Edna kept her voice low. “I bet he’s up there right now on his hands and knees with his butt in the air and his ear to the floor. Honestly, Harriet, I don’t think I can take much more.”
    “So he knows you’re talking to your sister. Big deal.”
    “Big deal!?” Edna tightened her grip on the phone. “He’s out to get me. It’s like having a killer upstairs.”
    “For heaven’s sake, Edna, he’s just a harmless old man with nothing better to do.”
    Edna felt a surge of anger. She’d been hurt by gossip before. Why couldn’t Harriet understand? “Want to know what that ‘harmless old man’ said about you?”
    “About me? What?”
    Edna paused for a calming breath. “Forget it. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
    She slammed the phone down and paced her small living room–from the card table in the corner that served as her dining room, past the sagging couch, to the drawn window blinds and back again. Wilson, her old orange cat, paced with her. By their third go round, Edna sank to the couch and caved in on herself. “Oh Willie-boy,” she said, trying not to cry, “I’m so alone.”
    Edna and Wilson had recently given up their city apartment for a studio in the Blue Hills retirement community. It had been hard enough to admit she was no longer able to live on her own in the city. Then she met her new upstairs neighbor.
    “I’m telling you, Missus,” Mr. Ratner had said when Edna first ran into him, “that Mrs. Bailey who lived here before? She was a nut-case. Kept her shades down all day. Then there was that nasty business with her daughter.” Mr. Ratner dangled the dirt under Edna’s nose before he revealed it with a flourish.
    Edna had called her sister as soon as the man left. “You should have seen how he grinned when he told what happened to that poor Mrs. Bailey.”
    “Don’t get so worked up,” Harriet had said. “He’s probably just happy that she left”
    “Like Louise Jessop was happy I left?”
    Edna had always run the library book sale until Louise, her so-called friend, spread rumors about Edna’s competence and grabbed the job herself. It wasn’t true, what Louise had said about her, but Edna was too devastated to fight back.
    She stooped to pick up the cat and hugged him desperately. “Why are people so mean?”
    The cat squirmed but let her squeeze him.
    “At least I’ve got you, old friend. We’re not mean, are we?” She held Wilson up with his face close to hers. “And we never snoop, do we, Willikins?” She bounced him up and down, as if his whole body nodded agreement.
    Suddenly, there was a thump in the outer hall that she shared with Mr. Ratner, then another... and another. Edna’s eyes narrowed. Willie’s ears twitched.
    “Don’t worry,” she whispered to the cat, “it’s just The Snoop going down the stairs.” She held her breath as the man made his way through the hall and out the front door to the street.
    Edna hesitated, then rushed to the window and peered through the slats of her drawn blinds. “It’s self-defense,” she explained to the cat when he gave her, what she thought was, an accusing look. “He’s dangerous. Like Louise.”
    The man was standing by the garbage cans. He had small, vigilant eyes and a pointy face that slanted out from his forehead to his nose and sloped back to a receding chin. He dropped a neatly tied plastic bag into his own can then lifted the lid on Edna’s and sniffed the contents.
    A geyser of outrage erupted in Edna and hissed out in a whisper. “That’s our can!” She set Willie on the rug and started pacing again. “And this isn’t the first time.” She thrust an angry finger at the cat. “Remember when I caught him going through our garbage—not just looking in the can but actually opening a bag? And he didn’t even bat an eye. ‘There’s such a bad smell here,’ he said.” Edna mimicked the man’s self-righteous tone. “’I thought I better check if anything’s leaking.’”
    The cat sniffed.
    “That’s what I say too,” Edna agreed. “There was a bad smell all right but it wasn’t from our can.”
    Wilson rubbed warm and soft against her leg. She stroked his throat the way he liked and felt calmed—for a moment.
    “Then there was that time I raised the kitchen shade and caught him with his nose pressed to the glass. Wasn’t that something? And he had the nerve to smile and knock on the window as if he’d come to pay us a call.”
    Edna glanced through the slats again. “He’s gone. At least we don’t have to whisper for a while.”
    Wilson was over fifteen years old and didn’t hear well anymore but Edna still talked everything over with him. Whom else could she turn to? Certainly not her sister.
    “That man is ruining my life and what does my dear sister say?”
    The cat headed for his litter box in the bathroom and nudged the door shut behind him.
    Normally Edna never intruded on anyone’s privacy, including Wilson’s, but these were not normal times. She followed him and stood in the doorway while he did what he had to do. “’Don’t get so worked up,’ she says. Can you believe it?” Edna was getting worked up just thinking about it.
    “We’re trapped here, Willie-boy. I could never go through another move. But that sister of mine doesn’t understand. ‘He’s just a harmless old man with nothing better to do,’ she says. But you understand, don’t you, Willikins?”
    The cat scratched a few grains of sand over his deposit, then stood there, looking Edna in the eye.
    She thought he was being impertinent and was about to scold him for not covering his business, but there was something about his look. She glanced at the pile in the box...at the cat...at the pile...and a grin spread across her face.
    “What a naughty idea, Willikins.” She picked him up and nuzzled him. “But it might just work. Not yours, of course, he’d suspect us at once, but I’ll find a way.” With a solemn expression she proclaimed, “Let’s give that ‘harmless old man’ something to do.” And then she grinned again.
    Two weeks later, someone buzzed Edna’s bell and the sound set off a thrill inside her. “This is it,” she whispered to Wilson. “Wish us luck.”
    When she unlocked her door, there stood Mr. Ratner, rubbing his hands as if in anxious anticipation. After a brief greeting, he got right to the point. “You came home rather late last night didn’t you, Missus?”
    “I did,” said Edna with, what she hoped would pass for, a smile. Willie crouched at her feet, as if set to pounce.
    “Tell me,” the man lowered his voice, “did you notice anything...out of the ordinary?”
    Edna feigned innocence. “Out of the ordinary?”
    “I’m only asking because—” He hesitated as if weighing Edna’s trustworthiness.
    “— because something happened.” His nostrils flared as he dumped the awful truth in Edna’s lap. “Late last night or early this morning, someone threw dog doo inside our gate.”
    “No!” Edna tried to sound sufficiently incensed.
    “Yes!” The man nodded with satisfaction. “Right on our walk.”
    “Couldn’t it have been a dog that did it?”
    “No. You see, it’s happened before.”
    Edna saw no reason to argue that it could have been a dog the other time as well. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”
    “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”
    When Edna agreed, Mr. Ratner glanced up and down the hall and moved closer. He paused to peer past Edna, no doubt to see into her living room, then went on. “You know Mr. Minsky, next door? The one with the beer belly? Well! Don’t tell a soul but two weeks ago, he started feeding the pigeons. Now that’s all well and good, he has a right to do that if he wants—the old coot probably has nothing better to do anyway—but he was doing it in front of our entrance. And you know what that means?”
    So much scorn gushed from the man, Edna stepped back to avoid it.
    “It means we get the pigeon splash and he gets a clean walk. Now I went over there and asked him—politely—to stop. But no, he went right on doing it.” Mr. Ratner raised a fist as if to emphasize the heinousness of this deed. “How do you like that!”
    “Well, um...” Edna wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t want the man to go after Mr. Minsky. Besides, she rather liked watching pigeons.
    But the man was too incensed to notice that Edna hadn’t replied. “And you know what Higgens, our so-called manager, said? ‘There’s no law against feeding pigeon,’ he said.” The man pointed his face at Edna. “I mean, what do we pay the good-for-nothing for? He never does a thing when you need him, does he?”
    This time he didn’t even wait for Edna to respond. With a vindictive snort, he continued. “Now I’m an old man and I can’t even open my front windows anymore because one of them birds might fly in. Why, I had to clean their splash off the window sill twice already.”
    “That is too bad,” Edna offered. “But how can you be sure it’s Mr. Minsky?”
    The man shrugged as if it were obvious. “He’s not our kind of people.”
    Without knowing exactly what Mr. Ratner’s kind might be, Edna understood that, for the moment at least, she was included in that hallowed company.
    “No,” the man was saying, “not our kind at all. I like someone who’s direct, who says what they mean and means what they say.”
    He’s going to destroy Mr. Minsky, Edna thought, and it’ll be my fault.
    “Don’t you?”
    “Me?” The question hit Edna unexpectedly.“Why yes, of course.”
    “This other one now, he’s indirect. That’s why I know it’s him that’s done this. Besides,” Mr. Ratner concluded like a lawyer wrapping up a fool-proof case, “he’s got a dog.”
    “Come to think of it,” said Edna, “I did notice something last night.”
    ‘You did?” Mr. Ratner’s head jutted forward, his nose twitched.
    “Yes, it was shortly after I’d come in. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I heard a woman cough just outside my window.”
    “A woman?” Mr. Ratner paled.
    “Well, it sounded like a woman, but it might have been a man imitating a woman, just to throw us off track.” Edna was starting to enjoy herself.
    Mr. Ratner seemed to falter. “’A man imitating a woman?’”
    Edna gave him an extra shove. “Mr. Minsky isn’t the only one here with a dog.”
    “True,” Mr. Ratner conceded, “but he’s the only one who’s got reason to do this.”
    “What if someone else has a reason that you don’t know about?”
    “That I don’t know about?”
    “Or what if this has nothing to do with you at all? Maybe it’s me they’re after”
    “You?”
    “Or what if it’s someone who doesn’t even have a dog? I don’t have to tell you, Mr. Ratner, even with all the laws against it, people leave enough you-know-what on the street for someone to pick it up if they’ve a mind to.”
    “But you’re saying it could be anybody.”
    Edna nodded gravely.
    It must have been an overwhelming prospect. Mr. Ratner sagged momentarily, then seemed to gather his forces and rally. “Well, you can rest assured, I’ll be on my guard from now on.”
    “Thank you,” Edna said with genuine relief. “I’m sure you will.”
    “Don’t you worry. I’ll get to the bottom of this. Even if I have to watch everyone.”
    “At least you won’t have to watch me and Willie,” Edna joked.
    “Yes, at least there’s that.” Mr. Ratner seemed in no mood for levity.
    Edna picked up the cat and together they watched the man march down the hall, peer through the glass in the front door, and sniff the air as he went out.
    “Maybe we’re going to like living here.” Edna grinned at Wilson then hurried inside to call Harriet.

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