Rex Stout (22 page)

Delia shook her head without willing it.

“She’s not here?”

She shook her head again.

Rufus Toale put the palm of his right hand, the fingers outspread, against his breastbone, and pressed it there. “I mustn’t breathe much,” he declared with no improvement in his voice. “I feel it bleed inside when I breathe. I’ve been wounded. Shot. I plugged it with my handkerchief to keep the blood in. If I’m dying … your sister?”

Delia shook her head. “She’s not here.” His zealot’s eyes, out of his white face, bored into hers. “Can I trust you with God’s errand? Do you believe in the vengeance of man?”

“Who—” Delia stopped with her mouth working. “Who shot you?”

He ignored it. “Do you believe in the vengeance of man, my child? I think I’m dying. Answer me.”

That was one of the things Delia had figured out in jail, and apparently she had got it fixed in her mind, for she said clearly, “I don’t believe in vengeance. But if you’re wounded—I must—”

“No!” His voice and his eyes held her to the couch. “This comes first, then whatever comes. You must know it all—if I can—” He controlled a grimace, then inhaled a long slow breath, with a catch in the middle of it. “I thought some day to tell you this, you and your sister, as we kneeled to God—as I did your mother. Now without the preparation of prayer—oh, I entreat you, take the guidance of God! The facts are brief, but follow His guidance!”

“The facts—”

“About your father. God rest his soul. He was not a devout man, but he was a good and friendly man. When he left on that fatal trip two years ago he had with him much worldly money and a little of God’s money. I gave it to him. It was my own money, but it was for my church. It was God’s money. I gave him ten twenty-dollar bills, and in the corner of each one I wrote R.T. for Rufus Toale. He was to select a worthy man to receive them, and whatever treasure that man found in the rocks was to return to my church for the glory of God who made the hills and all the treasure in them. I gave that money, God’s money, to your father.
He had it. He was killed and it was taken from him, with the other money he had.”

Rufus Toale stopped, to take another long careful breath, with his hand still pressed against his chest, where it had stayed without movement. His lips twitched and he went on, “That money was taken from your father by the one who killed him. I said nothing about it. I furnish no fuel to the fires of man’s vengeance. But I am human. I didn’t often see twenty-dollar bills, for God’s money is smaller sums, but when I did see one I looked at it. And the day came when, to my horror, I found that I had in my possession one of those bills I had given your father. The R.T. was in the corner just as I had put it there twenty-one months before. I knew where I had got it. Under the circumstances there could be little—little doubt—”

He stopped again to breathe. “I think—” He gasped, trying not to; the fight he was making showed on his face; he reinforced his right hand by spreading his left one over it to hold it tight. “I think—I must finish. The blood inside—chokes me. The bill was taken from me—there where I was shot—as I lay pretending I was dead—to escape death.”

He gasped and a spasm went over his face. Delia, paralyzed with horror, could make no movement. He swayed in the chair and braced his elbow against the arm.

“Praise God!” he whispered fiercely. “I must leave you—with His errand! I must finish! The guilty must confess and submit—but not to man, to Him! You must go to—God! Help me!” His elbow slipped from the chair’s arm and he started to crumple. “Praise God!” he croaked, gasping, and collapsed, hanging on the arm of the chair almost precisely as Dan Jackson had done, arms dangling to the floor.

Delia, staring, said, “No.” She repeated it. “No!” Without moving her eyes from him, she got to her feet and backed away. “No,” she said again, and stopped. She could scream. She, who had thought everything out so carefully and definitely, could scream. Someone would hear her. “No,” she said. A doctor. Yes, of course a doctor; but Clara? Clara—

The telephone rang. She took a deep shivering breath, then, with no hesitation and with firm steps, went to the little table, put the receiver to her ear and said, “Hello?”

“Is this the Brand residence?”

“Yes. This is Delia Brand.”

“Is your sister there? Clara Brand?”

“No, she isn’t here.”

“Well, hold the wire. The county attorney wants—”

“Wait a minute.” Delia’s voice was clear and steady. “Hello? Send a doctor here at once. There’s a man here that’s been shot and he may be dying. Send a—”

“What! You say shot? Who—”

Delia hung up. Her fingers trembled as she got the phone directory and flipped the pages to the T’s, but she found the number without fumbling, took up the receiver again, and dialed. As she waited her back was to the couch and the chair.

“Is this the parsonage?”

“Yes, ma’am. This is the housekeeper.”

“This is Delia Brand. Is my sister Clara there?”

“No, ma’am, she’s left.”

“How long ago?”

“Oh, maybe five or ten minutes. I let her in the church because she said she’d rather wait there, and she came back and said she wouldn’t wait any more and she left.”

“Thank you very much.”

Delia hung up again. For the next call she didn’t need to consult the book, for she knew the number of Ty Dillon’s little apartment on Beech Street. In a moment she removed the receiver once more and dialed. There was no answer to the ringing. When she heard a car in the driveway, continuing to the garage, she kept the receiver to her ear; at the sound of steps on the porch, she lowered it; as Clara appeared in the door she dropped it on the rack.

“He wasn’t there,” Clara said. “Why didn’t you go to bed? I waited an hour, but Mrs. Bonner didn’t know—” She stopped, transfixed, her eyes aimed past Delia’s shoulder at the middle of the room. “Del! Good God, what is it?” She ran across, stooped, peered, straightened up, faced her sister. “Del! For God’s sake, Del—”

“No!” Delia said fiercely, bitterly. “He came here—he came in and sat down and said he had been shot and he was dying—and I thought you had—I thought you—and now you thought I—we are thinking each other—”

She burst into laughter. She stood laughing crazily, swaying, her shoulders shaking and rocking back and forth. Clara sprang for her, seized her shoulders, and pressed her forcibly into a chair. “Sis, for God’s sake stop—Sis! Stop it! I didn’t think anything! Sis, Del darling, you mustn’t, you mustn’t—”

Ed Baker’s voice sounded from the door. “They’re both here.”

Clara froze. Delia was giggling.

Baker went on, entering, “Over there, doc, in the chair. If he’s dead don’t move him till I get a look. Bring the boys in, Frank. There’s enough here for everybody.”

T
he average daily circulation of the
Times-Star
for the year was 9,400. Wednesday and Thursday the pressrun had been 12,000 and 14,200, respectively. Friday it was 17,600, an all-time high.

Rarely did the Fowler Hotel have newspaper reporters, much less photographers, registered as its guests. Even when a public figure was within the county, the world learned of their daily doings only through the services of local journalists. But by Friday noon the register could boast eleven such entries, from Spokane, Denver, the coast, and points between.

Governor Matthews of Wyoming was a democratic man. Ordinarily no qualification was necessary in order to achieve entrance into his office at the capitol at Cheyenne except two legs to walk in with. But on Friday he didn’t even go there himself. He was in a room with a locked door at the Pyramid Club in Cody and the only people who knew it were there with him.

The church of which the Reverend Rufus Toale was pastor had always been open on weekdays, for those who might wish to enter to pray, but seldom might more than one or two suppliants have been discovered there. Friday they straggled in and out all day, pointing
out to each other inside, with whispers, the place where Clara Brand had sat the evening before, just prior to murdering the pastor. At the same time other people were slowing up their cars as they drove past 139 Vulcan Street, pointing out the windows of the front room in which Delia Brand had shot and killed Rufus Toale, forty-eight hours almost to the minute since she had shot and killed Dan Jackson, which was surely a record. The contradiction was merely one aspect of the raging controversy which had divided Park County into two hostile camps.

In his office on the top floor of the new Sammis Building on Mountain Street, Lem Sammis, with his jaw permanently sidewise, sat gazing across his desk at a man, ten years his junior, whose dark intent eyes displayed neither friendliness nor good humor but yet were not antagonistic. The man was saying:

“No, Lem, I’m not selling any soft soap. You may cut my throat some day or I may cut yours. But we’re together against these rats. Baker turns it off before this day’s over or he’s done, and we’ll get Carlson. The mining business made this state, and by God, the mining business will run it. Maybe your daughter killed Jackson or maybe you did it yourself. I don’t give a damn. I hope to put the screws on you some day, but not like this, and not with that bunch helping me. Matthews has crawled into a hole, but I’ll find him and I’ll deal with him.”

Lem Sammis said coldly, “I’m asking no favors, Ollie.”

“Favors hell. You know and I know how it stands. We can deal with each other after we’ve dealt with this. I’ll get hold of Matthews.”

“When you find him tell him from me—”

“I’m not telling anybody anything from you. I’m telling ’em myself.”

“Go to hell.”

“After you, Lem.”

Ollie Nevins departed. Sammis sat awhile without moving, then reached for his phone and spoke into it. In a moment the door opened and Chief of Police Frank Phelan entered, glanced apprehensively at the old face with the rigid sidewise jaw, crossed to a chair, and sat.

“Well, Frank? They froze you out?”

Phelan nodded gloomily. “They did. They wanted to use my men on a warrant to search Dan’s house and I balked.”

“Who gave ’em the warrant—Merriam?”

“Yes.”

“They going to use it?”

“Yes. A pair of them goddam county tramps.”

Sammis’s jaw went another quarter of an inch sidewise. “Searching Amy’s house. Lem Sammis’s daughter. Huh? Tell me what happened before you left.”

Phelan cleared his throat and started. That was around noon.

It was still happening, at the courthouse. In the county attorney’s office Baker was at his desk, a stenographer with a notebook was across from him, Sheriff Tuttle stood by a window with his hands in his pockets, and Clara Brand was seated in a chair which directly faced Baker’s. She looked resolute and tense, but played out, with her eyes swollen and bloodshot, and her hands, in her lap, kept clasping and unclasping. She was saying:

“I don’t care what you’ve found out or haven’t found out. I told you everything last night and I told you the truth.”

Baker himself looked the worse for wear. His eyes were bloodshot, too, and he had the general appearance of a man indulging in a hangover. He gazed at her and demanded, “Then you stick to your story as you told it last night?”

“I do.”

“And you expect me to believe it? Do you remember what you said? You said that when the housekeeper told you she didn’t know where Toale was or when he would be back, you told her you would wait and you would like to wait in the church, and she got the key and let you in at the rear. So far all right, Mrs. Bonner says the same thing. You told her that no matter what time Toale returned you would be in the church and she was to ask him to join you there. You groped your way down the aisle to the pew your mother always occupied, and you sat there an hour without moving. Then suddenly you decided to leave, to go home, and you went and told Mrs. Bonner and then got in your car and drove home. That was your story.”

“It still is.”

“But it’s not as plausible as it sounded last night. As I’ve told you, you are not charged with the murder of Rufus Toale. You are not at present charged with anything. But at least one detail of your story is next to incredible. Last night we had no notion of where Toale had been when he was shot. This morning we learned that it must have been there alongside the church, between the drive and the rear entrance. We found where he had fallen into the edge of a flower bed. His hat was there and there was blood on the grass. Undoubtedly, returning, he had either taken his car to his garage or left it there on the drive and, before entering the parsonage, had gone toward the church for
the nightly visit which was his invariable custom. That’s where he was shot. The rear door of the church was standing open. You were seated in that pew, in silence and darkness. Will you tell me again that you heard no shot fired?”

“Certainly I will. I’ve told you why. If the shot was fired there.”

“It was. You said you were buried in your thoughts. You were oblivious. Frankly, I don’t believe it. So oblivious you didn’t hear a shot fired as near as that? It must have been from a point between the flower bed and the church, if Toale was headed for the church, as he must have been, for the bullet entered the middle of his chest, pierced the lung and lodged in the spine. No matter how deep you were in thought—”

“I tell you I didn’t hear it.” Clara clasped her hands again. “Or maybe I heard it but I didn’t know it. I’ve told you I had just learned what people were saying about my mother. I’ve told you that’s what I went there to ask him about. I didn’t hear any shot, and that’s all I’ll ever say about it. It’s all I can say.”

“You heard no shot, no call for help? Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“And you were in that pew continuously from the time Mrs. Bonner let you in until you went and told her you were going home?”

“I was.”

“And—we’ll put this on the record again today—you didn’t shoot Toale yourself?”

“I did not.”

“You didn’t hear his car on the drive and conceal yourself in the shrubbery and, as he approached with the lights of the car behind him, shoot him?”