"The Catbird Seat" starts off like a conventional murder story. The author James Thurber wants the reader to expect that Mr. Martin intends to commit a perfect crime. Ulgine Barrows became a "special assistant to the president of the firm, Mr. Fitweiler," where Martin was head of the filing department at F & S. Martin had loathed the woman from the moment he met her. She is loud, vulgar, and incompetent. In the short time she has been with the firm, she has created chaos in some of the departments--and now Martin knows instinctively that she has her eye on his beloved filing department. She obviously thinks it needs streamlining. She is thinking of throwing out a lot of the older files and selling the steel cabinets for scrap. Two comments that reveal her budding intentions are the following:
"Do you really need all these filing cabinets?"
And:
"But you sure have got a lot of fine scrap in here!"
At present she has Mr. Fitweiler's complete confidence, support, and authority. This is why Martin has decided that the only way he can save his department is to kill her. His plan is to make it look as if the man who murdered her in her apartment had to be someone whose character was entirely different from Martin's own well-known ultra-conservative, abstemious, strictly routine behavior. He buys a pack of cigarettes because he is known to be a non-smoker.
It was his idea to puff a few puffs on a Camel (after the rubbing-out), stub it out in the ashtray holding her lipstick-stained Luckies, and thus drag a small red herring across the trail.
When he gets to her apartment he asks for a Scotch-and-soda because it is well known that he is a non-drinker as well as a non-smoker.
But the story, which seemed to be developing into a fairly standard murder mystery of the perfect-crime sub-genre, suddenly takes a turn. Martin realizes that he isn't a murderer but that he can utilize the contradictions between his clues and his character in another way. The next morning Ulgine Barrows dashes into Fitweilers office to report everything Martin did and everything he told her. Fitweiler can hardly believe his ears. He has known Martin for twenty-two years. Martin tells him:
"I walked home. Then I went to Schrafft's for dinner. Afterward I walked home again. I went to bed early, sir, and read a magazine for a while. I was asleep before eleven."
While the two men are talking, Ulgine Barrows storms back into the president's office.
"Is the little rat denying it?" she screamed. "He can't get away with that!....You drank and smoked at my apartment," she bawled at Mr. Martin. "You called Mr. Fitweiler an old windbag and said you were going to blow him up when you got coked to the gills on your heroin!....If you weren't such a drab, ordinary little man," she said, "I'd think you planned it all. Sticking your tongue out, saying you were sitting in the catbird seat, because you thought no one would believe me when I told it! My God, it's really too perfect!"
"Perfect" is really the right term, because Mr. Martin has always been a perfectionist. Ulgine Barrows' temper tantrum and her seemingly wild accusations only confirm Mr. Fitweiler's belief that the woman "has suffered a complete breakdown." He has to call for help to have her forcibly ejected from his office. That is the end of her services at F & S.
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