Rex Stout (23 page)

“I did not.”

“It was Lem Sammis who told you what people were saying about your mother, wasn’t it?”

No answer.

“Wasn’t it Lem Sammis who told you that?”

“That’s none of your business. I’ve already told you that I won’t say who told me.”

“Didn’t Lem Sammis, with his wife, call at your home last evening?”

“That’s none of your business either.”

“Well, he did, and it was soon after he left that you went to see Toale.” Baker leaned forward and narrowed his eyes at her. “Look here, Clara. Will you listen to what I say?”

“I’ll listen.”

“All right. I want you to believe, because it’s the truth, that I’m not trying to build up anything against you. Things like your telling me Wednesday morning that you had gone to see Atterson Brothers Tuesday afternoon, and my learning that you hadn’t been there, and your saying now that you went to the Fowler Hotel and waited there for Mrs. Cowles—I’m not holding that against you. I don’t even hold it against you that you refuse to tell me any of the things that happened, that must have happened, in Jackson’s office the past year or two. I don’t hold it against you because I understand it. You’re being loyal to Lem Sammis, the old friend and partner of your father. How would you feel if you knew that Sammis had tried to frame both you and your sister on charges of murder?”

Clara stared.

“I ask you, how would you feel?”

“It’s a silly question,” she said shortly.

“Maybe and maybe not.” Baker was earnest, urgent. “I’m not accusing him of it, because I’m not ready to. But here are some facts. It’s a cinch that someone
framed your sister for Jackson’s murder—her gun, her handbag there on the desk. But whoever did it must have known that Delia would be going there that evening. Who did know it? Even you didn’t; you’ve said so. There was only one person who knew it, and that was Sammis; he himself had written the note for her to take to Jackson. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t think—” Clara stopped. In a moment, “It’s absurd,” she snapped.

“You don’t mean absurd, you mean it’s hard for you to believe. Lots of things are hard to believe, and Lem Sammis has done a few of them. You know as well as I do how much tenderness he has for anyone he has decided to crush. Those are the facts about Delia. Now you. It must have been Sammis who told you what people were saying about your mother. Wasn’t it?”

No answer.

Baker spread his palms. “It must have been. Why did he decide to tell you that, and the part that scandal gives Toale in your mother’s suicide? Did you go at once to see Toale? You did. Was he murdered? He was. Under circumstances that threw suspicion on you? Yes.”

Clara shook her head. “It’s simply fantastic.”

“It’s not fantastic at all. There’s a logical connection right straight through. Sammis thinks that I suspect he or his daughter shot Jackson because of his affairs with other women. I don’t. At least I’m inclined not to since last night. I more strongly suspect that Jackson was killed because he had recently got hold of evidence that might lead to the solution of the murder of your father two years ago.”

“My father—”

“Yes. That comes from Quinby Pellett, your uncle, and a man named Squint Hurley. And now Toale. You
know what he told your sister while he was dying. With a hole in his lung and that bullet in his spine, he got himself back to his car and drove to your house and walked in there to tell it—and then all he told was about the marked bill and its being taken from him after he was shot. If he had it on him it was taken, all right. That marked bill, again, was evidence that might solve the murder of your father. So Toale was killed for the same reason that Jackson was. And he was killed by someone who either murdered your father or had a hand in it. And that someone was Lem Sammis. Well?”

“I don’t believe it. It’s crazy.”

“It’s far from crazy.” Baker leaned at her again. “You’re thinking, of course, that Sammis was your father’s partner and best friend. But you must have heard some of the talk around that time about your father and Amy Jackson—or maybe you didn’t, since you’re Brand’s daughter. Anyway there was talk and certainly Sammis heard it, and you know what he thinks of his daughter. It’s the one spot in him that’s probably tender clear to the bottom. So it’s far from crazy.”

Clara shook her head.

“You don’t believe it?”

“No.”

“You don’t even think it’s possible?”

“No.”

“All right, you don’t. You’re shocked. You’re incredulous. You’re probably wondering, or you will, why I’ve told you all this, since it’s ten to one that you’ll pass it on to Sammis as soon as you get a chance. I’ve risked that and told you about it because I’ve got to get a lot of information from someone who has been close to Jackson and Sammis and I’m expecting it from you. I want you to think about it. I’m going to put you
in the next room, alone, and I ask you to think it over for an hour, two hours, as long as you want to. Remember the facts I’ve told you. Remember all the little things, and big ones too, you’ve heard and seen back over the years. Consider it all. I don’t think you want to be loyal to Lem Sammis or help him cover up if there’s any amount of possibility that he killed your father or was responsible for it, and Tuesday night and last night he was willing to direct suspicion at you and your sister in order to divert it from himself. Will you go in that room and think it over?”

Clara was gazing at him with fresh trouble in her bloodshot eyes. But she said firmly, “I don’t think I need to.”

“I’m going to put you in there. Will you think it over? Then I want to have another talk with you.”

“Do I have to? Stay in there?”

“For a while, yes.”

“Well … I would know better what to think if I could have a talk with Mr. Sammis first.”

“No doubt,” said Baker drily. “I’m sorry. Nothing doing.”

“Then if I could telephone my sister. Or Mr. Dillon.”

“You can do that afterward.” Baker abruptly stood up. “It’s comfortable in there. Come on. It’s far more comfortable than the quarters you’d have if you had been charged with murder, as it was intended you should be.”

B
y two o’clock Friday afternoon, the hour at which Clara Brand was shut in a room alone to think it over, the commotion at the Brand house on Vulcan Street had almost completely subsided. Cars, slowing down for their occupants to stare, frequently passed in the street and a uniformed policeman was hanging around the sidewalk in front to discourage collections of pedestrians, but that was all. Intent heavy-footed men were no longer peeking under shrubs to find where a revolver, hurled through a window by Delia Brand after shooting Rufus Toale, might have landed; that activity had been stopped some five hours earlier, when the ludicrous straw hat and the bloodstains had been discovered at the edge of the flower bed in the churchyard, as had been a similar exhaustive search inside the house itself. The same discovery had freed Delia from any further badgering, which had gone on intermittently all night; at least twenty times she had had to repeat her conversation with Toale after his staggering in, or rather, his monologue; and thrice she had re-enacted the scene for them, with her on the couch as she had been and Sheriff Tuttle in the chair doing Toale.

Now, at two o’clock, there was no one in the house with her except Ty Dillon, not even the
reliquiae
of the pastor who had fought his way there on God’s errand and had been choked to death by his own blood before he could complete it. Upstairs in Delia’s bedroom, she was lying down and Ty was slowly pacing the floor. Each time he turned at the end of his beat he halted and gazed at her, as she lay there on her back with her eyes closed and her fists clenched at her sides, but he said nothing. They had talked it all out. They were agreed: that they believed Clara’s story and she had no knowledge of the shooting of Toale; that whatever had motivated Lem Sammis’s request to Clara to withhold information from the county attorney, she should disregard it and tell everything she knew about everything; that if she were arrested Phil Escott should be her counsel; that anything like peace of mind and a tolerable existence for the Brand girls, in Wyoming or anywhere else, was impossible until the murders of Dan Jackson and Rufus Toale were cleared up; that the murder of their own father two years ago should be included, in view of the stigma which gossip had attached to their mother’s name; that they should not run away from it but should stick in Cody and see it through; and that if they, Ty and Delia, were to do anything about it, they hadn’t the slightest idea where to begin. Quinby Pellett, who had been there and talked with them for two hours, had likewise agreed to all those points, including the last one; he had no more cards up his sleeve, he confessed in cold and impotent rage, like his knowledge of the theft of Delia’s handbag; and he had gone off with vague mutterings about what he would do and what he would see to. That was the hopeless and dreary situation at two o’clock when Ty, halting for the hundredth time to gaze at Delia and
to wish to God she would relax or take the drug the doctor had left her, heard the doorbell ring.

He opened the door to leave the bedroom as silently as possible, but Delia opened her eyes. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know. I bribed that cop to keep everybody out. I’ll see.”

“Maybe it’s Clara—no, she has a key.”

“I’ll see.”

Downstairs, when he opened the door, he found two men standing there: the cop, and towering beside him one with a weathered face and nearly white hair, his eyes scarcely more than slits. The cop broke in on Ty:

“Yeah, I know, but the only way to stop him would have been to plug him one. He’s like a burro in everything but size. Maybe you don’t know who he is? It’s Squint Hurley. The one that was tried for the murder of Charlie Brand and got acquitted.”

Ty regarded the old prospector. “What do you want, Hurley?”

“I want to see Charlie Brand’s girl on a business matter.”

“Which one?”

“The older one, I guess she is. The one that was working down at Jackson’s office.”

“That’s Clara. She’s not here. She’s down at the courthouse.”

“When’ll she be back?”

“I don’t know. Possibly not till tonight.”

Hurley grunted. “I’ll wait here on the steps,” he said and turned, tramped the width of the porch, and sat on the top step.

“If you need help moving him”—the cop grinned—“phone the station for a squad.” He detoured around Hurley and strode down the path toward the sidewalk,
where a group of schoolgirls had halted and seemed about to enter for an attack on the house.

Ty demanded of the denim shirt that covered the broad back, “What do you want to see Miss Brand about?”

“Who are you?” Hurley asked without turning.

“I’m Tyler Dillon, Clara Brand’s lawyer. Also Delia Brand’s lawyer.”

Hurley grunted. “Wherever you go in this damn town you run into a lawyer.” He twisted his head around. “Delia? That’s the one I found in Jackson’s office the other night with the gun in her hand. Maybe I might see her instead of her sister. Is she here?”

“What do you want to see her about?”

“Business.”

“What kind of business?”

“Important business. It ought to be important to Charlie Brand’s girl if she’s got any curiosity about who killed her dad.”

“Explain it to me and I’ll tell her about it.”

Hurley shook his head. “I guess not. I guess I’ll just wait here till the older one comes.”

Ty stood, frowning, through a long silence. Finally he asked, “You say it is something about the death of her father?”

“It sure is.”

“Wasn’t it you that discovered Brand’s body in that cabin?”

“It sure was.”

“Wait here, will you?”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

Ty went in and back upstairs to the bedroom. Delia had swung her feet around and was sitting on the edge of the bed with her shoulders drooping. “Who is it, Ty? Anyone?”

He told her, and then advised her: “If I were you, Del, I’d go down and see what he has to say. You might as well be doing that as lying there clenching your fists …”

She consented to go, but with no eagerness, saying that if Squint Hurley knew anything he would have told it long ago. She brushed vaguely at her hair without making much impression on it, pulled her shoes from under the bed and put them on, and followed Ty downstairs. Not caring to enter the front room after what had happened there the evening before, she went to the dining room and was seated at the table, plucking at an edge of the embroidered cover, when Ty, having gone to the porch for the visitor, ushered him in. They sat. Hurley, on the imitation Sheraton chair, looked even more incongruous than he had in the courthouse office, but Delia didn’t notice it. Looking at him, she was trying to control the quivering of her nerves as she remembered the scene when that man who had been accused of killing her father had last entered a room and found her there.

She mastered the quivering and said, “Mr. Dillon says you want to see me about something.”

Hurley nodded. “You or your sister.” Keeping his squint directed at her, he aimed a thumb at Ty. “We don’t need him. I don’t do much talking anyhow and I do it better with just one.”

“That’s all right. He’s my—my lawyer.”

Hurley grunted. “You’re starting in awful young to have lawyers. I don’t know, maybe I ought to wait for your sister. It’s a matter of business. I’ve got to get back into the hills and I want a stake. I know a place in the Cheeford range—”

“Mr. Dillon said you told him it was about my father.”

“Sure it is. But I’d like to mention about the stake first. You’re Charlie Brand’s girl and I’d trust you same as I would your dad. I’d go ahead and tell you and trust you for the ante, but what makes it hard to talk is this lawyer sitting here. I go on and tell you and then he begins to talk and when he gets through neither one of us has got anything.”

Ty said, “I’ll go out if you want me to. But if you tell Miss Brand something, and she wants to grubstake you, I not only won’t talk against it, I’ll help her put up the stake. It’s true I’m her lawyer, but also I’m … we’re going to be married.”