Rex Stout (4 page)

The next spoken remark was some minutes later, and was a purely practical suggestion from Delia to the effect that she could drop her sister at the Jackson & Sammis office on her way to school.

The Pendleton School, accommodating grades one to six, was a long-suffering brick building placed in the middle of a spacious graveled yard. It was 1:20 that
afternoon when Delia Brand got out of her car and entered the schoolhouse. She exchanged nods with a teacher she met in the wide hall and proceeded to a room on the ground floor—a large room with no benches or desks, with no furniture at all except a table, a cabinet phonograph and a couple of chairs at one end. After depositing her hat and handbag on a shelf in a narrow cloakroom which was partitioned off, Delia returned to the main room, opened the cover of the phonograph, selected a record from a full rack on the table, placed it on the machine in readiness to play, and changed the needle.

The door opened and admitted a bedlam of scuffling feet. In they came, four or five dozen of them, brats, angels, kids, urchins, cubs, hoydens, lambkins, tendrils—it all depends. There was a good deal of variation as to height, weight and cleanliness, but they all appeared to be around nine or ten years of age. They cluttered in. There appeared in the doorway a large woman with sweat on her brow, who nodded at Delia and then vanished. A gong sounded somewhere and Delia commanded, “Places! All of you! Places!”

They began to arrange themselves in rows and files, with a surprising efficiency. The size of the room permitted a spacing of about four feet. When they were all in place, with the help of a few specific admonitions from Delia, and were standing quietly, she said in a throaty voice, “Good afternoon, children.”

They chorused, “Good afternoon, Miss Brand.”

She moved to the phonograph. “This afternoon, as you know, we will practice for the Closing Day Exercises. First I’ll play the piece and go through it myself, then I’ll play it over and you can try it. We must do much better than we did last week. Much better. Watch me closely.”

She started the music going, moved to front center, raised her arms and began Rhythmic Movement. Sixty pairs of eyes were fastened on her, some studiously, some understandingly, some desperately, a few scornfully.

But the ultimate in scorn for Rhythmic Movement was not being displayed in the main room at all, but in the narrow cloakroom behind the partition. To slip in there unseen as the army trooped in was not difficult for agile feet, with quick eyes to seize on the moment, and apparently that was what had been done by the two boys who squatted in the corner, the one with big ears looking sternly at the one with red hair, with his finger pressed tight to his lips. But as soon as the noise of the music was heard, the former let his hand fall and whispered hoarsely to his companion, “They’ve started! Can’t you just see ’em? They have started!”

The other shook his head and whispered back, hissing. “She does it first!”

“I can see ’em anyway! Standing there! Standing there waiting! They soon will! Oh, boy, they soon will!”

The red-haired boy nodded and hissed, “It’s horrible.”

For a while they were content to squat and whisper, but when their legs began to cramp they stood up. The big-eared one even tiptoed cautiously the length of the little room to the window, but drew back at sight of movement in the grounds outside. When, after a little, he returned to the corner, he had something in his hand.

“What you got there?”

“Miss Brand’s bag. Boy, is it heavy!”

“Where’d you find it?”

“There on the shelf.”

“What’s in it?”

To answer that required action, not words, and they proceeded to act. Squatting again, with the handbag on the floor, they opened it.

“Jeeee
-sus!
She lugs a gat!”

The red-haired boy took it and aimed it at the window, and his whisper was deadly and sinister: “Ping! Ping! Ping!”

“Quit that!” the other commanded. “It may be loaded. You’d better wipe off your fingerprints. Hey! Lookit this! Do you know what’s in that?”

“No. Neither do you.”

“Oh, I don’t, don’t I? Feel the weight. It’s catriches!”

The red-haired boy, grabbing for it but missing, said, “Take off the paper and see.”

“I don’t have to. Of course it’s catriches. What good’s a gat without catriches?”

“Is they any money?”

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know. There’s places to take money and places not to take money.”

“Aw, just a dime or maybe a quarter?”

“No, sir. Hey, lay off! But lissen. These catriches. We can use ’em. Put that in your pocket and give it to me after school.”

“What can we use ’em for?”

“I’ll show you when I get ready. Take it.”

“Why don’t you take it?”

“Because your pockets are better for the weight.”

“If we can take catriches why can’t we take money?”

“Because we can’t. One is negotiable and one isn’t. I’m telling you to take it!”

The red-haired boy, frowning, took the package and stuffed it into his hip pocket. The other nodded and said, “Now we’ve got to wipe everything. Here, we can
use this. And put the bag back just where it was. And lissen. You keep your hands off that doorknob. I’ll open it myself. It’s got to be timed right.”

The red-haired boy, feeling of his hip pocket, nodded morosely.

Four days of the week Delia had three schools to cover each afternoon, but on Tuesdays Pendleton was the only one. When she had finished there she got in the car again and headed for Main Street. Turning left, she continued until she had crossed the railroad tracks. After a right turn onto Fresno Street and another block, she pulled up in front of a two-storied frame building which could have used a coat of paint and various other attentions as well, though it was not precisely dilapidated. The ground floor front sported a large plate-glass window, elevated above the sidewalk, and the entire length of the window, inside, was occupied by an enormous brown bear who was licking a cub. Delia had not even the tribute of a glance for it as she mounted four steps and pushed open the wooden door and entered, clutching the handbag under her arm.

The room was about half as large as the one in the school which had been consecrated to Rhythmic Movement and was equally devoid of furniture, but it was by no means empty. On two wide wooden shelves which ran the length of one wall were more than a score of jack rabbits, representing practically every posture in the repertory of those leaping, long-eared crop destroyers. On similar shelves on two other walls were owls, grouse, wild geese, gophers, golden chipmunks, eagles, beaver, and other contemporaries. In one corner, with head up and haughty nostrils dilated, stood a black-tailed deer, a seven-point buck, and across from him was a yearling elk. Suspended from
the ceiling by wires was a forked tree limb, and on it crouched a full-grown lynx with its teeth showing. There were black bear, pelicans, coyotes. On a raised platform in the center of the room stood a cougar, fully five feet long, its tail curled against its flank, the sides of its jaws flecked with blood or a simulation of it, and its left forepaw resting on the carcass of a fawn.

Delia, after glancing around, stood beside the cougar and called, “Hello!”

There was no reply. Stepping through a door to a smaller room behind, which had a large workbench and displayed a miscellany of tools, bales and boxes, and work in progress, and finding it uninhabited, she returned to the front and crossed to a stairway which led to living quarters overhead. Her foot was lifted to the first step when she heard a noise at the door, the knob turning. Quick as a flash she made a dive and concealed herself behind a moosehide which hung over the stair rail. One entering could not see her except by going to the stairway, but with an eye applied to a slit between the moose’s side and his hind leg, she had a good view of the room.

She saw a man enter—a middle-aged man, slightly stoop-shouldered, in shirt sleeves and lightweight overalls and no hat, with a tanned face shining with sweat, and dusty graying hair. Three paces from the door he looked sharply around with gray squinting eyes, then, passing his palm over the rump of the yearling elk as he passed, he went to the platform and knelt to inspect the belly of the cougar. Then he leaped as if shot, a leap that would have been a creditable performance for the cougar itself, as an ear-splitting howl rent the air.

He landed flat on his feet, stared for a second, and said in a voice that had a suspicion of a tremble in it,
“Good Godamighty. Darn you anyway. Come out of that!”

Delia emerged, approached and stretched on her toes to kiss his cheek. “It’s been over two years since I’ve done that,” she said. “I don’t know why I did it, only I heard you at the door and I was there by the stairs. It’s something to know I can still do a coyote howl. The door was unlocked.”

He nodded. “I stepped down to the corner to phone.” He pulled a handkerchief from his overalls and mopped his face. “I guess I’d better get a phone put in—I would if I could afford it—or lock the door. My gizzard’s not as tough as it used to be. I darn near busted a gut that time.” He mopped his face again.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Quin. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m old enough to know better. What’s the matter with Noel Coward? Is his hair slipping? By the way, you ought to take a look at that coyote down at Kilbourn’s drugstore. The right shoulder.”

Quinby glanced at the cougar. “No, his hair’s all right. I was just looking at a patch. You say the one at Kilbourn’s? I’ll stop in.” His squinting gray eyes inspected her. “Did you come over here just to scare the daylights out of me?”

“No, I came to ask you something.”

“Want to go upstairs?”

“It’s cooler down here.” She went and sat on the edge of the platform which held the cougar, took off her hat and propped it and her handbag against the carcass of the fawn, and frowned at her toes.

Quinby Pellett seated himself beside her and began slowly wiping his face some more.

After a moment Delia said, “It’s still hell about Mother.”

“It sure is.”

“I go to the cemetery every day. I go in the morning.”

“I know you do. You ought to quit it.”

“You go, don’t you?”

“Sure I do.” He glanced at her and away again. “I’m nearly fifty years old and it’s a natural thing for me to fasten onto the past. She was my only sister and I didn’t have any brothers. But you’re just a youngster. Besides, I’m a grouch and that’s a good place for a grouch, a cemetery. But you ought to cut it out. You were strung too tight to begin with.”

“Maybe I was. Maybe Mother was too, the way she was affected by what happened to Dad. But the way it ended with her was worse than the way it ended with him. Did you ever try to put yourself in the place of someone feeling so terrible she wants to kill herself and does it? Did you ever try to feel it? And it was my mother, my own mother!”

Pellett said harshly, “She was my own sister, wasn’t she?”

Delia only looked at him. He looked at her and their eyes met, and then separated. After a little she said, “I have a sister, too. She’s being cheerful and brave. She has lost her job. Jackson fired her.”

“The hell he did. When?”

“Yesterday. Ending Saturday noon. It’s unspeakable. All the money they ever made, they made grubstaking, and Dad made that for them. Didn’t he?”

“I guess so. I guess he mostly handled it. What’d he fire her for?”

“He said something about it’s being as much for her good as his because there’s no future for her. It’s an alibi. I’m going to see him and find out. She has an appointment at Atterson’s office at four o’clock and I’m
going while she’s away. That’s what I came for, anyhow one thing, to ask you to go with me.”

“To see Jackson?”

“Yes.”

“What are we going to say to him?”

“We’re going to remind him of the facts and tell him he can’t fire Clara.”

Pellett shook his head. “He knows the facts, and one of them is that he can fire Clara. He and Lem Sammis own the shebang, don’t they?”

Delia flared. “They shouldn’t! He has no right to!”

“Legal right, yes. Moral right, maybe not. But that kind of an argument won’t get you anywhere with Dan Jackson if he’s made up his mind. It wouldn’t help any for me to go there with you. I have an appointment to see him on another matter and I’ll have to go at him myself. By the way, it’s not Jackson you’re getting ready to shoot, is it?”

Delia’s head jerked around at him. “Who told you?”

Her uncle regarded her sourly. “That young partner Phil Escott’s got. Dillon. He came around to see me and ask me to help head you off. He thinks you mean it. He don’t know you as well as I do. Still got the gun in your bag?”

“Yes.”

“Dillon said you said it’s your father’s.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re still wearing the paint and feathers?”

“Yes.” Delia was gazing at him, her eyes burning as they had burned at Marvin Hopple across the counter. She said, “You think you know me, Uncle Quin.”

“I know darned well I know you. Haven’t I seen a lot of the exhibitions you’ve put on? Dillon wanted to know if I thought there was any chance you were faking and I told him no. I never knew you to fake. What
you do, you work yourself into a fix like a prospector crawling an old tunnel he’s never tried before. But his fix may end by his starving to death, while yours is only in your mind. You’re just like a man that’s been hypnotized, only you hypnotize yourself. But a man that’s been hypnotized can’t be persuaded to do anything really violent or dangerous, and neither can you. You may persuade yourself to go around toting a gun and buying cartridges and scaring young lawyers, but when it comes right down to it you’ll get a cramp in your trigger finger. See if you don’t.”

“I’ll see,” Delia said calmly, with only a suggestion of steel in her voice.

Her uncle nodded. “That’s one reason you fool people, you don’t go raving and yelling around, you just make quiet statements. Mostly. You use your eyes more than your tongue. I’ll give a little proof that I know you as well as I say I do. I know who you’re getting ready to shoot.”