Rex Stout (12 page)

Phelan turned on his heel, went and stood in front of the booty, glared down at him and stated a series of
facts. “Your name is Al Rowley, you’re a vagrant and a bum. I can lock you up or toss you out on your ear or whatever I damn please, and about an hour ago Mr. Pellett here stopped you on the sidewalk in front of The Haven and you socked him in the jaw. Right?”

“I’m not a vag—”

“Oh, shut up! Did you hit Mr. Pellett?”

“Maybe, but I didn’t—”

“I said shut up! What did you hit him for?”

“He had no right stopping me like that—”

“How did he stop you?”

“He just got in front of me and stopped me.”

“Did he do you any violence?”

“No, he said something, I don’t know what, and when I stepped back he made a grab at me, and just on the impulse I lammed him.”

“And ran like hell. What were you scared of?”

“I wasn’t scared, it was just an impulse—”

“Some day you’ll get impulsed once too often. Take a look at Mr. Pellett. I said look at him! When you saw him today he was wearing a mustache, but the time before that he wasn’t. Did you recognize him today in spite of the mustache?”

“I didn’t recognize him at all. I never saw him before.”

“What about yesterday?”

“Yesterday? Whereabouts yesterday? Not that I remember.”

Phelan looked disgusted. “Oh, come off it, Rowley. We’ve got you. Three different people saw you take that bag from that car and then hand it to Pellett when he stopped you.”

“That’s a lie, chief. A damn lie. They’re all dirty liars.”

A low growl came from Quinby Pellett, and Phelan shook his head at him and then resumed, “Do you deny they saw you on that street?”

“I don’t know if they saw me, but nobody saw me take any bag from any car. If I was on the street and they saw me then they saw me. What street was it?”

“Shut up. Where were you yesterday?”

“Well, yesterday.” Rowley considered. “Let’s see. In the morning I managed to earn four bits—”

“How’d you earn it?”

“Oh, just working around—”

“Skip it. Where were you in the afternoon?”

“Well, in the afternoon I was tired and I took a little rest, and then I went for a walk and stopped in at The Haven and dropped the four bits, and then I came out and walked around some more and went back to my boarding house—”

“When you came out of The Haven what did you do first?”

“I walked.”

“Yeah. You walked to a car and saw a handbag there and lifted it, and Pellett stopped you and you handed it over—”

“Listen, Chief.” Rowley leaned forward and waggled a finger for emphasis. “I may be a vagrant and a bum, if that’s the terms you want to use. But I’m not a sneak thief. No, sir. Anybody that says they saw the kind of thing you described is a pure liar. I don’t include Mr. Pellett in that. He don’t look like a liar and I’ll apologize that I hit him. I’m willing to call it a mistake in identity. If he made a mistake—”

“Shut up! The people that saw you aren’t liars.”

“They are if they say they saw me take anything out of a car yesterday afternoon. In full daylight like
that, right on the street? I will never in God’s world say anything except to say that they’re liars.”

That proved to be, in substance, all that could be coaxed or threatened out of him. After another twenty minutes of it Phelan offered him to the sheriff, but Tuttle said he was satisfied as it was. Quinby Pellett was permitted to do some questioning, but got nowhere.

Phelan had another try, but finally threw up his hands in disgust and told the escort, “Take him and throw him in the river!”

“My God,” Pellett protested, “you’re not going to turn him loose!”

“What can I hold him for? If we book him as a vag we just have to feed him.”

“He knocked me down, didn’t he? Didn’t he assault me? For God’s sake, don’t let him go!”

“Do you want to charge him with assault?”

“I do.”

Phelan nodded to the escort. “All right, boys. Take him over and assign him. Give him dried lizard for supper. Tell Mac, Pellett will sign a charge.”

They trooped out, much less eager than when they had entered. The chief of police sat down, looking weary and fed up. The sheriff rubbed his nose.

Pellett looked from one to the other, got tired of waiting and demanded, “Well? What about my niece? How could she have killed Jackson if her bag was stolen?”

“She couldn’t,” Phelan said, and seemed to be through.

“Well then?”

Phelan aimed a thumb at the sheriff. Tuttle heaved a sigh. “I’ll tell you, Pellett. That’s a good story you’ve
got. Now what about it? Officially I’ll say this: we’re much obliged and we’ll investigate it thoroughly, all aspects of it, and form the best opinion we can. Unofficially, naturally you want to do everything you can to help your niece, and it’s too bad you haven’t got any corroboration at all for any of it that’s connected with the bag, since even the man that helped you look for it on the stairs is the one that was murdered, and I imagine the jury will feel about the same way.”

Pellett stood up, his teeth clenched. “You think I’m lying? You think I made it up?”

“I do,” said Tuttle. “Unofficially.”

“I don’t know, Quin,” said Phelan peevishly. “How the hell do I know?”

Pellett, his teeth still clenched, turned and left the room.

It was only a short walk to the new Sammis Building on Mountain Street and he went on foot. Arrived there, he took the elevator to the fourth floor, entered a door halfway down the corridor and told a young woman seated at a desk, “My name is Quinby Pellett. I’m Delia Brand’s uncle. I want to see Mr. Anson.”

She asked him to wait, and disappeared through another door. After a moment she came back and nodded to him. “Come this way, please.”

The following morning the citizens of Cody found on the front page of the
Times-Star
a display box which read:

It was a good likeness of Quinby Pellett.

T
yler Dillon slept fitfully that night. He had not seen Delia. He had accomplished nothing. Phil Escott had listened to his recital and plea, and had said he would think it over but it looked like a bad one. So Dillon didn’t sleep well. At six o’clock he got up and dressed because he couldn’t lie still any longer. When the morning paper was delivered he read the display box on the front page three times, then, without waiting for breakfast, got his car and drove to Quinby Pellett’s place, finding him in the living quarters above the taxidermy shop. He was there half an hour, and came away with a new hope and a new despair which approximately balanced each other. After getting some fruit and coffee at a lunchroom on Mountain Street, he went to his office. He wouldn’t be able to see Escott, who would be in court all morning, but Wynne Cowles was expected at ten o’clock to sign some papers connected with her divorce suit. When she came he found occasion to remark that he hadn’t known she was in a partnership with Clara Brand, but all he got in reply was a mind-your-business glance from her, with her pupils gone slightly elliptical.

As soon as Wynne Cowles had departed, he told his
stenographer he would be back after lunch and drove to Vulcan Street to see Clara. He found her more depressed and wretched even than she had been the day before. She had visited Delia at eight o’clock, but had been permitted to stay with her only ten minutes. She had seen the
Times-Star
, but even after Dillon told her all the details he had got from Pellett, her eyes took on no light.

“Do you think Pellett’s lying?” Dillon demanded.

“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “Of course if he had to he would do worse than lie for Del’s sake. He’s crazy about her. He always has liked her better than me. But whether he’s lying or not, you say the sheriff thinks he is.”

Dillon let that go and went on to the chief purpose of his call. “I’m hunting for a straw to grab at,” he declared, “and a thing Pellett said struck me. He thinks there may be some connection between the murder of Jackson and what happened to your father two years ago. That was just about the time I came to Cody and I don’t know much about it. Your father was Jackson’s partner in the grubstaking game, wasn’t he?”

Clara nodded. “He was really Mr. Sammis’s partner, but Jackson was let in on it when he married Amy Sammis. Sammis furnished the money in the first place and Dad did most of the work. In those days nearly everybody in Wyoming who had any cash tried their luck at grubstaking and quite a few did it on a big scale, but Dad was more successful than anyone else because he really worked at it. He didn’t just pick up any loafer that came along, or sit and wait for the prospectors who were down and out to come to him; he went out and got the good ones. At one time they had nearly three hundred grubbers scattered all over the
state. That meant an investment of over two hundred thousand dollars and Sammis furnished the money. They made big profits—it was one of their men that found the Sheephorn lode—but Dad didn’t know how to hang onto money. It always fascinated me from the time I was a little girl, the idea of finding gold and silver and zinc and copper buried in the rocks, and sometimes Dad let me go on trips with him. That was another way he was different from other grubstakers; he visited his men no matter where they were, and advised and encouraged them and maybe got them out of trouble.”

“And it was on one of those trips that he was murdered?”

She nodded again. “Down in the Silverside Hills. He was on a regular trip, but he had an unusually big sum of money with him—thirty-two thousand dollars—because he had got a tip that a wild duck had uncovered a big streak over east of Sheridan—”

“What’s a wild duck?”

“A prospector on his own, that hasn’t been staked. Dad was going to take a look at the streak and try to buy the claim if it looked good. He had several stops on the way and he hadn’t got there yet when he was found dead in that old cabin on the rim of Ghost Canyon.” Her lip quivered, and she stopped and got it firmed. “I had been to that old cabin with him just the year before. You couldn’t get to it by car. We had to take horses at Sugarbowl and ride ten or twelve miles.”

“Then whoever killed him had a horse.”

“Maybe not. He could have walked from Sugarbowl or anywhere along the road there, or he might have been out in the hills already.”

“Were there many around?”

“Almost no one. There are no sheep in those hills, nothing but sagebrush and greasewood and rocks, except a few piñon in a spot or two at the canyon. The only one known to be around was a prospector named Squint Hurley, one of Dad’s men who was using the old cabin for headquarters. Dad had gone there to wait for Hurley to show up. It was Hurley that found him. Hurley was arrested and tried, but the bullet that killed Dad was from a different kind of a gun than Hurley’s.”

“And the money was gone.”

“Yes.”

“And none of it has ever turned up.”

“Not that anybody knows of. Half of it was in tens and twenties, because that was the way Dad liked to have it for the men. Not even new bills. They don’t like it new.”

“But one thing.” Dillon was frowning. “It must have been someone who knew he would be there and knew he would have all that money—shall I get that?”

“Please do.”

He went to answer the doorbell. He opened the door and found himself confronted by a large woman with sweat on her brow, wearing no hat. Dillon, thinking he had seen her before but unable to place her, said good morning.

“Good morning.” Her tone was businesslike. “I am Miss Effie Henckel, principal of the Pendleton School. I would like to see Miss Clara Brand.”

Dillon did not know that the reason he stammered in replying was because of his subconscious memory of a similarly formidable principal in a school he had attended in San José. But he did stammer.

“M-Miss—er—M-Miss Brand is not seeing anyone. That is, I mean even her close friends. I’m Tyler Dillon,
an attorney and a friend of hers. If it is something I can take care of—”

“I prefer to see Miss Clara Brand. It may be something very important.”

“Of course. But under the circumstances—as I say, I’m an attorney. Won’t I do?”

“You
might
do,” Miss Henckel conceded, fixing him with an authoritarian eye. “So might the sheriff do, or Harvey Anson, who I understand is Delia Brand’s lawyer. But I deal with men as little as possible because I much prefer to deal with women. I would like to see Miss Clara Brand.”

Dillon acknowledged defeat without more ado, asked her to step inside and take a chair, and went to the kitchen and described to Clara the nature of the situation. With a weary sigh Clara arose and went to the front room, with him following her, greeted the caller, and sat. Miss Henckel, after an inspection of Clara’s features, apparently to make certain of the identity, spoke tersely:

“I wish, Miss Brand, you would convey to your sister the sympathy and good wishes of myself and my staff at the Pendleton School. Tell her that even Miss Crocker joins us in that expression. Your sister and Miss Crocker don’t get on very well. But though I am glad of this opportunity to send your sister that message, that isn’t what I came for.”

She opened her bag, a large hand-embroidered one, and took out something and handed it to Clara. Clara stared at it but took it. Dillon, leaning forward and perceiving what it was, looked startled and fastened his eyes on the principal, but kept his mouth shut.

“That,” said Miss Henckel, in a tone that defied contradiction, “is a cartridge box and in it are thirty-five cartridges for a .38 revolver. This morning one of the
patrons of my school, Mr. James Archer, came to my office with his son, James Junior, who is in the fourth grade, and told me that when he returned home from work yesterday he found that a structure had been erected in a corner of a shed adjoining his garage. The structure consisted of berry boxes held together with paper clips, tacks and rubber bands, and at intervals holes had been punched through the boxes with an ice pick or gimlet, and protruding from the holes on the outside were cartridges. He questioned his son and was told that the structure was a fort on the Yellow River in China. Then he dealt further with his son and learned that the cartridges had been stolen the day before, Tuesday afternoon, in the cloak vestibule of Room Nine in the Pendleton School, from Delia Brand’s handbag.”