Rex Stout (17 page)

Baker leaned back in his chair, gazing at her. She stood, waiting, and finally asked, “Is that all?”

“I guess it is. For now.”

“Then I want—may I have my handbag, please?”

“No, you can’t. It’s locked up. It’s evidence.”

“I don’t mean the gun. Just the bag.”

He shook his head. “It was there on the desk and you say you didn’t take it there. It’s important evidence.”

Her lip quivered; she controlled it. “There’s a picture of my mother and father in it. May I have that?”

“I’m sorry. The bag and its contents will be kept intact. You’ll get it back when—when the time comes.”

“Thank you,” she said, and turned and walked out of the room.

She had already decided what she was going to do next, but there was a little delay in her plans. Though it was close to six o’clock, the anteroom of the county attorney’s office was far from empty. Four men, one in the uniform of a state trooper, sat in a corner talking in subdued tones. Another group of three men sat against the wall: Bill Tuttle and Ken Chambers, and between them the roughly dressed man with a weathered face and nearly white hair whom Delia had last seen Tuesday night when, with a warm gun in her hand, she had turned at the sound of a voice. Her glance had encompassed those two groups when she was attacked from two directions. A pair came trotting at her, one with a
noisy vocal barrage and the other aiming a camera; and simultaneously, from the other side, her name was called and she saw Clara, Ty Dillon and her Uncle Quin. Dillon, on the run, swerved to intercept the reporters, with Pellett supporting, while Clara seized Delia’s arm and hustled her to the door and through it.

“But Sis—why—you shouldn’t have waited all this time—”

“There’s a mob out front, Del—it’s awful—come this way—”

They made it to the back stairs and clattered down, and near the bottom were overtaken by Dillon and Pellett, panting. In the basement they took a narrow side hall and came to a back door, closed, with a man standing there. Dillon handed the man something, and the door opened and they passed through. The large paved court where parking was reserved for officials’ and employees’ cars was almost deserted and they hurried across it to a maroon sedan which Delia recognized as Dillon’s.

He told her, “Pile in!”

Delia balked, shaking her head. “I’m not going home.”

They stared at her.

“I mean not now. Not first. First I’m going to see Doctor Toale.”

“Holy smoke!” said Uncle Quin. “Listen to her!”

“You’re not going to walk, are you?” Ty demanded. “Pile in anyway!”

They all climbed in, Ty taking the wheel. The engine roared and the car leaped forward, circled careening, and scooted for the gap leading to the street. Delia caught a glimpse of many faces as they swept by. She demanded of Clara’s ear, “But why a mob? Not after me!”

“Sure they are.” Clara squeezed her arm. “They want to give you three cheers and carry you home on their shoulders. The radio said you were being questioned as a witness and would soon be released. What’s this about going to see Doctor Toale?”

“I’m going, that’s all.”

Clara opened her mouth to reply, but the car careened again, turning a corner, and she grabbed for the strap; and then, apparently, thought better of it. Three minutes later the car rolled to a stop at the curb, under a tree on River Avenue, and Ty Dillon, behind the wheel, twisted himself around to face the back seat.

“Now,” he said, with a challenge in his tone. “The place for you is home. I thought you said you had been doing some thinking the past two days?”

“I have, Ty.” Delia didn’t quicken to the challenge. “Of course the place for me is home. But first I’m going to see Doctor Toale.”

Pellett demanded, “What for?”

“Not for anything foolish, Uncle Quin. I know you all think I’m a fool. I’ve been locked up in a jail, and you think as soon as I get out I want to do something mysterious and dramatic, but I don’t, I swear I don’t. What I’m going to do is quite simple and straightforward. You can drive me home and I’ll take my car—where is my car? I left it on Halley Street.”

“It’s home in the garage,” said Clara. “Frank Phelan had it brought around yesterday.”

“Then if you’ll drive me home I’ll take it—”

“Nothing doing,” Ty declared shortly. “If nothing else, with that open car you’ll collect a crowd wherever you go. Damn it, you’re a sensation! The whole town thinks you shot Jackson and you’ve been turned loose
through Sammis’s influence. I’m telling you, you ought to go home and lock the door. What do you want to see Toale for?”

Delia shook her head. “I’ve changed, Ty.” She frowned into his eyes. “Really I have. But before I go into that house again that was Dad’s house, where my mother died, I’m going to do something and I know what it is, and it’s all right.”

He looked at her. “Okay.” He twisted under the wheel. “We’ll drive you there and we’ll wait out front.”

The comfortable and attractive parsonage occupied by the Reverend Rufus Toale, widower, was at the rear of the church, on Maltbie Street. The table on which he ate his modest evening meal, when he had no guest, was in the bay window of the sitting room, which he preferred to the dining room at that time of day because it was cooler, and because from his chair there he could see the tinted enlarged photograph of his deceased wife hanging on the wall. He was gnawing fragments from a lamb chop bone when his housekeeper entered to announce that Miss Delia Brand wished to see him.

“Who, Mrs. Bonner? Are you sure?”

“I am, sir.”

“Praise God! Seat her in the library.” He slowly and methodically wiped his fingers on his napkin, his lips moving in silent prayer, took a drink of water, arose and buttoned his coat, and went to the library, a smaller room across the hall.

Delia was standing up with her eyes fixed on the door, awaiting his entrance.

He stopped three paces short of her. “Sit down, my child.”

She shook her head, swallowed, and said nothing.
She swallowed again and said, “I just came to tell you something.”

“But you can tell me sitting. Guests and friends who talk, children of God—”

“I’m not a guest or a friend, Doctor Toale. I’m not a child of God either—not your God—”

“My poor child, you are overwrought with this ordeal—”

She blurted, “You told Sheriff Tuttle today that it was you I wanted to kill.”

“So I did. I had tried to see you—”

“You were right.” She stood with her back straight, her arms straight at her sides. “I did want to kill you. I even thought I was going to kill you. I decided to. But I’ve been seeing into parts of me that I never saw into before and I don’t think I would ever have done it. I think I was hysterical. I think I was a false alarm and a four-flusher. Anyway, that is all past and everything that is gone is past. I want to tell you that I know you killed my mother, I don’t know how or why, but I know you did, and that’s all I want to say. And I don’t care whether you are punished or not, because when I was lying there on a cot I was looking at Mrs. Welch and thinking about it—and something she said to me—about evil and wickedness and mercy. I couldn’t ask for mercy for you, even if there was anybody to ask, but I’m not going to be a faker and a four-flusher any more and try to pretend that I—that I—”

She faltered. Her lips were working but not saying anything, and she couldn’t stop them.

The Reverend Rufus Toale stepped forward with a hand outstretched. “My poor child! God bless you—”

“Don’t you dare to touch me!” she gasped, and turned and fled from the house.

He stood in the hall five minutes, his lips moving
silently, looking at the front door she had left open. Then he went and closed the door, returned to the table in the bay window of the sitting room, glanced up at the tinted picture of his wife and, glancing down, saw that the other lamb chop was cold and greasy.

C
ounty Attorney Ed Baker was laying down the law to two of the three men who were seated in his office with him. “You can either keep your mouth shut, Chambers, or get out. I didn’t send for Hurley in order to badger him, but to get information from him. You keep out of it unless you get an invitation. Understand?”

The Sheriff of Silverside County allowed grudgingly, “I guess I do.”

“Okay—and you, Hurley, if you find it painful to have any contact with Sheriff Chambers—”

“It makes me puke just to look at him.”

“Then keep your head this way and you won’t see him. I’m letting him stay because it will save time if I want to ask him something. As I told you, the first thing I want to know is exactly what happened Tuesday evening. I know you’ve told it before, but it’s a different setup now. It’s not as simple as I thought it was. Now go ahead and don’t leave anything out.”

Squint Hurley looked out of place, and he looked as if he felt out of place, sitting on a chair in an office. He looked too big for one thing, and those physical characteristics which made him a homogenous part of the
landscape on a sagebrush flat or the rocky chaos of the dry sun-baked hills rendered him, in these ordered surroundings, almost grotesque. He muttered, “I ain’t talking to Ken Chambers. That pile of dried-up guts. That’s understood. If he starts asking me anything—”

“He won’t. You’re talking to me.”

“All right. I’m not a good talker, because out in the hills I get talking to myself. I’ve been doing that for forty years and it’s not the same thing. It’s a different kind of talk.” He raised a horny old hand, with one finger gone, to chase a fly from his ear. “But you want me to say what happened Tuesday night. The first thing happened Tuesday night, I was the biggest goddamn jackass I’ve been since 1898 when I went to Cuba. I had two hundred and ninety-one dollars, enough to last in the hills to the other end of luck. Slim Fraser says come along to a joint and take a whirl, and I went. First time in thirty-two years. I think it’s because I’m just as strong as I ever was but my will power’s getting wore out. Anyhow I went, and he took me to that place The Haven—”

“What time was that?”

“That was around eight o’clock. The sun was on a good slant. I played the wheel a while with four-bit chips, mostly nineteens because it was in 1919 that I come on that streak over on the Cheeford range—”

“How long did you stay there?”

“I stayed there too long. I anted right down to my seams. I was only playing little ones, but after two hours, a little more than two hours I guess, I was as dry as last year’s skeleton. I didn’t come to even then, the fever was up, and I asked Slim for some but he was low too and wouldn’t do it, and it came in my head that there was only one man in this town I could prospect and that was Dan Jackson. I knew where he lived and I
thought I would walk out there, but when I got on the sidewalk it came in my head that his office was right there and it wouldn’t hurt to see if maybe he was around. The door wasn’t locked and I went in and up the steps and saw there was a light there and the door was standing open. I went in. I guess I was walking easy because I don’t often walk on boards and I don’t like the noise my feet make on boards. Anyhow I saw that girl with the popgun in her hand with her back to me, walking over to him hanging over the side of the chair.”

“Had you heard a shot as you were going up?”

“No.”

“Was there a smell in the room as if the gun had just been fired?”

“There was a little smell. I wouldn’t say like the gun had just been fired. I don’t know much about things in rooms, smells or anything. I’ve told you all this before.”

“I know you have, but I want it again and more of it.”

Baker proceeded to get it. The warmth of the gun, the way Delia was holding it when first seen, the position of the bag on the desk, what Delia had said and how she had acted and looked, the exact position of Jackson’s body—those details and many others were thoroughly and monotonously explored.

Finally Baker said, “All right, Hurley, that seems to cover that. Now to go back a little, you say you got to The Haven at eight o’clock?”

“I recollect I said around eight o’clock.”

“Were you in The Haven all the time until you left to see Jackson and get money from him?”

“Yes I was. The fever was up.”

“Would Slim Fraser or anyone say you were there all the time?”

“I guess he might. I guess the man at the wheel might, he ought to.”

“Do you know exactly what time it was when you left?”

“No, I don’t. I didn’t have any timepiece, and anyhow I didn’t care, and anyhow you can tell if you want to because you know when I made that phone call and I left The Haven about four or five minutes before that.”

“Sure.” Baker eyed the old prospector, not with hostility. “I tell you frankly, Hurley, I don’t think you shot Jackson, but everything has to be considered. The doctor got there at 10:35, twenty minutes after you called the station. He said Jackson hadn’t been dead more than an hour, and he died as soon as the bullet hit him. So if you can establish that you left The Haven only five minutes before you made the phone call, you’re out of it entirely and—”

“Like hell!” It was Ken Chambers exploding. “He could have sneaked—”

Hurley’s massive form started to lift from the chair. Baker snapped with ferocity, “Can it! One more yap and out you go!”

“But he could have—”

“I said can it! I know what he could have done as well as you do and probably better.” Baker finished his glare before turning back to his witness. “For one thing, Hurley, if I thought it likely that you shot Jackson, I’d have to find out how you got hold of that gun, because it’s been proven that it was that gun that fired the bullet. I’m being frank with you because I want you to be frank with me. Now, for instance, what gave you the idea that you could get money from Jackson?”

“It came in my head.”

“What put it there?”

“What put it there was that he already gave me some.”

“When?”

“That morning. That same day.”

“How much?”

“He gave me three hundred dollars.”

“What for?”

“For what would anybody suppose? For a stake. He grubbed me.”