Rex Stout (27 page)

Wynne Cowles! She considered it, her face twisted in an agony of concentration.

Yes, she decided. She could try that, because if it didn’t work she would have given nothing away and she could try something else. But it would work. She would make it work. On her way there she would decide how to do it, and it would work. She looked at her watch: twenty to six. She sprang to her feet. Clara might come any minute.…

She ran downstairs and scribbled a note:
Clara
,
I’m off on an errand
,
will be back around eight or nine. This is for Ty too if he brings you home or phones. Del
. She left the note under a cup on the kitchen range, ran out to the garage for the car and made the gravel fly as it scooted down the drive for the street.

During that forty-minute drive there were two distinct areas of activity in her brain, one managing the driving and the other considering plans of attack on Wynne Cowles.

She had never turned in at Broken Circle Ranch before, though she had often passed it. There was no one around as she left the car at the edge of a graveled space adjoining the tennis court and made for the house, toward the veranda with its bright-green awning. She started off briskly, but after ten paces her steps lagged, for she had not actually made up her mind what she was going to say; and her gaze wandered to take in the ensemble of the picturesque retreat this rich cosmopolite had fashioned here in the Wyoming hills, as if from that she might get a hint. Not that she had any conscious expectation of finding one; so that when she did find one in fact, astonishment stopped her in her tracks. She stood with her head tilted back, staring up to where, on the forked limb of
the tree near the veranda, a cougar, startlingly lifelike, crouched in readiness to leap.

A voice said, “Excuse me please. You want something?”

She jerked around and saw the Chinese who had emerged from the house. “Yes. I want to see Mrs. Cowles.”

“Name please, lady?”

“Delia Brand.”

His face twitched. “I tell her. You come in the house?”

“No, thanks. I’ll wait here.”

Her knees were trembling. She pulled a wicker chair away from the table under the tree and sat down. She wanted to look up again, to see how it looked from directly beneath, but resisted the impulse. Then she wanted to move, not to have it just above her, but she resisted that impulse, too. She was sure now, miserably sure. She might get up and go away and not see Wynne Cowles at all—but no. She would have that satisfaction and that confirmation before she left. Left for where? What could she possibly—

“Hello, hello!” Footsteps clicking on the tile, approaching. “John wasn’t sure about the name and I thought maybe it was Clara. How is she? Where is she?” Wynne Cowles stood smiling down at her.

“She’s all right.”

“Is she home?”

“Not yet. She will be at seven o’clock.”

Wynne Cowles made a noise of depreciation. “You poor kids. It’s hellish. Won’t you come inside or on the veranda?”

“This is all right. I want to ask you something.”

“Sure you do.” She kicked a chair around and sat.
“I’ll bet I know, that bottle of wine. I told your cavalier to take it to you, but he went off mad.”

“You can’t blame him much, can you? Since you told him a damn lie?”

“Oh, now.” Wynne Cowles looked reproachful. “Tut tut, my dear. When you say that, smile.”

“I don’t feel like smiling.” Delia met, steadily, the intentness of those strange eyes. “I haven’t smiled any too much for two years. I suppose that’s what I’m fighting for now, a chance to smile again some time. You would understand that, you’re a clever woman. I don’t like you and I wouldn’t be like you if I could, but I know you’re clever. I’ve been a melodramatic little fool. I thought about you while I was in jail, while I was thinking about everybody and everything, and I saw that there are good things about you as well as bad. Of course I didn’t know then that I would soon have to make you do something you didn’t want to do, but it was what I thought then, what I found out by thinking, that made me capable of doing it.”

“Good for you!” Wynne Cowles smiled. “Intelligence always wins. What are you going to make me do?”

“I’m going to make you tell the truth about that paper you lied to Ty about.”

“Fine! That’ll be fun. Go ahead.”

“I am.” Delia’s gaze was unwavering. “Just to show you—you probably thought we supposed the ‘mountain cat’ on that paper meant you. Of course it didn’t.”

“No? What did it refer to?”

“Look up into the tree.” Delia’s tone sharpened. “No, straight up! That’s it. Mountain cat ready for prey. It is called cougar or puma or catamount or mountain lion or mountain cat. You like mountain cat, so that’s what you called it on that paper. Didn’t you?”

Wynne Cowles shrugged. “My dear girl, use your intelligence. I’m willing to grant you have some. What’s the use of discussing a paper that no longer exists, if it ever did?”

“I came here to discuss it. We’re going to discuss it. I have to know. On the way out here I thought of ways to make you tell about it. One way I thought of, since you lied to Ty just to save yourself notoriety, I thought I could easily tell a lie myself that would give you notoriety anyway that you couldn’t prevent. I could tell the police that Tuesday afternoon, when Jackson and I heard a noise in the hall and went to investigate I saw you there hiding behind that bin. Jackson saw you too, and you begged us to let you go and we did. Now my conscience makes me tell about it.”

“My dear!” Wynne Cowles’s eyes had widened. “Didn’t I admit you’re intelligent? But they wouldn’t believe you.”

“Oh, yes. I assure you they would. They’d believe me enough to make it very unpleasant.”

“Amazing. Do you mean you’re threatening to do that?”

“I mean you’re not going to stick to your lie about that paper. I’ll do anything I have to do to get the truth from you. I have got to know who you gave it to and I’m going to know.”

Wynne Cowles, with movements uncommonly deliberate for her, leaned forward to reach the carved bishido box on the table, got a cigarette and lit it, sat back and sent a puff of smoke ascending toward the cougar in the tree.

“You already know, don’t you?” she murmured.

Delia gulped. “You admit you wrote that on that paper?”

“I admit it here to you, yes.”

“You gave it to—you gave it to my—” Delia gulped again.

“Yes. As you have guessed, it was an order for that. A sort of a memorandum. Apparently I didn’t put a dollar sign in front of the 450. Carelessness.” Wynne Cowles leaned at her and said brusquely, “Look here. Haven’t you had enough? What the devil good is it? What good is any talk about that paper? The paper has certainly been destroyed. He killed Jackson Tuesday night and took the paper and destroyed it. Even if he were arrested and tried, what kind of evidence would it be? That prospector would say he found it and I would say I wrote it and tell what I did with it. What would that amount to? The fact that a man was given a piece of paper is no proof that he killed a man who was found lying on top of it, especially when you can’t even produce the paper. I tell you it’s no good. I think you are intelligent. If you are you ought to realize—now wait—now—don’t—Delia!”

So rarely had he heard his employer’s voice pitched high and loud in urgency that the Chinese came trotting onto the veranda in a flurry of concern, all the more since the lady caller was one who shot people; but at the edge of the tile he halted, seeing that no assistance was required. The lady caller was moving swiftly across the graveled space beyond the lawn, headed for her car; and the lady employer, quite unhurt, was standing under a tree watching and no longer raising her voice. John, ashamed of his intrusive agitation, shuffled to the table and arranged magazines, pretending that his sally had been in the interest of neatness, but out of the corner of his eye he observed that the lady caller had hurried to her car not to produce a weapon but merely to climb into it and drive away.

Wynne Cowles stood and looked around as if she might see something she could hit somebody with. “Damn,” she said, in a civilized tone, but not without feeling, and entered the house. “The damned incredible outrageous idiocy of the general manager of the universe,” she said, and went to a corner of the living room where stood an inlaid cabinet and stand, and got out the telephone directory. Having found the number, she got the phone and dialed.

No answer. She waited. Still no answer.

Then possibly he was still at the office. She looked up another number and tried that, but with the same result. No one answered. In exasperation she fluttered the pages of the directory and found still a third number. From that one, at least, she got a voice which told her, yes, that was Mr. Escott’s residence. She asked to speak to Mr. Escott, and he was put on. No, he said, with the decent courtesy due a $5,000 client, he didn’t know where Mr. Dillon could be found at the moment. Mr. Dillon had been there speaking with him, but had left only a few minutes ago. It was possible that Mrs. Cowles might find him, then or a little later, at the Brand home on Vulcan Street, if she cared to try.…

So she looked that number up and tried it too, but again there was no answer. She gave it up in disgust. Anyway, it would be another thirty minutes before Delia would get to Cody, and she could try again later.

T
he idea of the mountain cat popped into Delia’s head as she sat in the car, stopped at the roadside a mile or so beyond Frenchy’s Corners. She had stopped there because she didn’t want to enter Cody until she had resolved what to do. At the moment the idea came she had about decided that the only possible thing was to run away. She could go home and get the money from the drawer, all but that twenty-dollar bill, facing through it somehow with Clara if she was there, and leave at the first opportunity. She would go in the car, heading for California, perhaps taking a train from Ashton for the coast … at least, somehow, somewhere, losing herself.

The vengeance of man. God’s errand. She could be the instrument of neither. Not now. What others might or might not do about it, that was either God’s business or man’s, but not hers.

What kept her from instant execution of her plan of flight was the germ of doubt that still existed. If she had possessed certainty it would have been at once incommunicable and unbearable, and to flee with the unsharable secret would have been the only recourse
of desperation; but she was not certain. She was horribly sure, but she was not sure.

It was there at the roadside near Frenchy’s Corners, where she had stopped for a decision, that she thought of the mountain cat and remembered the scene three days earlier when her coyote’s howl had interrupted the inspection of a furry belly on which no hair was slipping.

That would prove everything. She might, if she had that proof, even be able to tell Clara and Ty, and share the secret and not have to carry it all alone.…

She started the engine, swung into the road, and in five minutes was in Cody. It was exactly half past seven. He wouldn’t be there. The usual dinner hour in Cody was around six o’clock, but it was his custom to work at his bench until seven and then go to the Pay Streak lunchroom three blocks away. Even if by mischance he were there he would be upstairs, and she needed only three minutes. And as a sudden impulse to repeat a childish trick had been responsible for the scene three days earlier, so now the memory of another childish trick from the days of Del the tomboy was the inspiration of her strategy.

She parked the car around the corner and walked to the two-storied frame building, with the plate-glass window, elevated above the sidewalk level, displaying the brown bear licking a cub. Without making undue noise, she climbed the four steps and tried the door. It was locked. She nodded to herself, and stood there a moment, aware that her heart was beating too fast and that her hand had been far from steady as she had turned the doorknob. But coolness was not especially required; the chief thing was speed, to get it done. She descended the steps, went to the corner of the building and passed along its side to the rear.

In the rear was clutter and chaos. Amid a stack of discarded mounting frames of rusty wire, weeds grew up to a man’s belt. Bales encased in burlap were stacked under the rickety steps. Packing boxes of all sizes and conditions were scattered around, and weeds were everywhere. Delia took it in with a swift glance, and saw that one of the packing boxes, a long narrow one, needed to be shifted only a few feet to serve her purpose. She grabbed a corner of it and tugged, got it moved, and upended it, propping it against the wall of the building. Then she scrambled up. It teetered and nearly fell, but she lunged to seize the window sill above her, got it balanced again, and pulled herself upright so that the window sill was at the height of her breasts. She saw that the window was open and the screen was apparently unfastened, and was trying to get purchase with her finger nails under the frame of the screen, when she nearly toppled off at the sound of a sharp call from somewhere behind her: “Hey there!”

She twisted her head and saw a man in a back yard among tomato vines. She waved a hand, clinging to the window sill with the other, and called, “Okay! The human fly! Free seats in the grandstand!”

“You’ll fall and break your neck!”

“Oh, no! You just watch!”

She stood a moment, her brain whirling. But why stop for that? Why stop for anything? She got her nails under the frame again, broke one prying it up, squeezed the tips of her fingers in the slit, exerted all her strength, and the screen went up with a bang. The rest was easy. Taking a firm grip with both hands inside, she leaped up and dived through, hung there an instant, wriggled on, and flopped onto the floor. She scrambled to her feet, waved from the window to reassure the horticulturist, and closed the screen. Her
heart was a hammer on the wall of her chest. Four steps took her to the workbench, where a miscellany of tools were arrayed in slotted cleats. She had long ago been permitted to play with many of those tools, though never the sharp knives; now a knife with a long sharp blade was what she took. With it in her hand she went to the door at the end of the partition and passed through it into the large front room. She had thought, anticipating this moment, that now she would go to the foot of the stairs and call his name, to make sure he wasn’t above in his living quarters, but the momentum of her urgency abandoned that precaution. Without even a glance at the stairs, she went swiftly to the mountain cat on the platform in the center of the room, the cougar with his paw resting on the carcass of a fawn; and, throwing herself on her back underneath its belly, ripped the tough hide with a savage sweep of the knife. But it was well mounted and there was only a slit, so she wriggled her shoulders and slashed crosswise, once, twice, three times. She seized the corners and jerked at the flaps, and the hole gaped open, and objects tumbled out and fell on her face and shoulders, and she squirmed away as if they had been deadly snakes, though a glance showed her that they were money, currency, packets of twenty-dollar bills. Her heart was hammering her chest.