Rex Stout (6 page)

“I don’t know.” Pellett slowly moved his head and eyes. “Oh, Delia. You here. Didn’t you say you were coming here? Sure you did.”

“You should keep quiet till the doctor gets here, Uncle.”

“Sure you did. So did I.” He turned his head again. “Wasn’t I coming to see you?”

Jackson nodded. “I guess you were. You were supposed to. How far did you get, the head of the stairs?”

“Yes. I did. I was going upstairs and I got nearly to the top—hey!”

“What’s the matter?”

“That’s where I got hit, at the top of the stairs!”

“So I suspected. Who hit you?”

“How the hell do I know?”

“Didn’t you see anyone or hear anything?”

“He ought to be quiet until the doctor comes,” Delia put in firmly.

The door popped open and a man in the uniform of a police sergeant entered, briskly. He nodded to Delia and the others and looked down at the man sitting on the floor with a grin.

“What’s the matter, Quin?” he demanded. “Doing a little research on the law of gravity?”

Twenty minutes later, upstairs in Jackson’s office, the police sergeant finished asking Delia a few questions, getting corroboration of Jackson’s story. The doctor had disfigured her uncle’s head with a bandage and stated that apparently there was no serious damage, and her uncle had insisted that he felt well enough to remain there for the business he had come to see Jackson about, so Delia departed.

She got into the car and made her way through the
traffic, heading south and continuing beyond the city limits into the valley. The attack on her uncle and the sight of him lying on the floor unconscious with blood on his head had started her nerves quivering and upset the order of her thoughts, so she was into the country before she remembered to look for her bag. She glanced at the seat beside her. The bag wasn’t there.

The car swerved and nearly slid into the ditch. She jerked it back into the road, then slowed down, steered to a wide spot in the roadside and stopped. A search behind the seat, under it, between the seat and the door, on the floor, yielded nothing. The bag was gone!

She sat behind the steering wheel, with her teeth clenched, concentrating. She was absolutely sure that she had left the bag there when she parked the car to go to Jackson’s office. Some passerby had snitched it. She was an incompetent little fool and always had been and always would be.

That gun was her father’s. She had meant, had utterly and with all her heart meant, to use that gun for the retaliation of the Brand family to the evil malignity which had murdered her father and driven her mother to suicide. She had so intended. Her teeth clenched harder. She had, she had!

What Ty Dillon had said. What Uncle Quin had said. About her getting a cramp in her trigger finger. They were dead wrong.

But she had left that bag, with that gun in it, on the seat of the car parked in the street and hadn’t gone back after it. Wasn’t anyone who would do that either a brainless fool or a cheap fraud?

And now what? Her father’s gun, her chosen weapon, was gone. Now what? It was to have been tonight. That had been irrevocably decided. Now what? Her jaw, aching from the clenching of her teeth,
began to quiver. Now what? Her head fell forward to the steering wheel, her face against her crossed forearms, and she began to cry. She hadn’t cried since her mother’s death. She cried quietly, not convulsively, but every minute or so her shoulders heaved as her indignant lungs issued the ultimatum, oxygen or death. She might, in the despair and dolor of that moment there at the roadside, while passing cars decelerated for the prolongation of curious glances, have preferred death, but nature requires something stronger than a mere passing preference to enforce that decision.

When finally she straightened up, her face and forearms were wet. She disregarded them. She had not answered the question, now what, as to the ultimate retaliation she had designed, but she was going on, at least, with the immediate job. She released the brake and shifted the gear and the car shot forward.

Ten miles farther on she slowed down again and turned right into a graveled and well-kept drive. At the edge of the public domain it passed under an enormous stone arch across the top of which was chiseled:
Cockatoo Ranch
. The Cockatoo had been the name of the lunchroom in Cheyenne where Lemuel Sammis had found Evelina long ago and when, in his opulence, he had bought a thousand of the most desirable acres in this valley and built a mansion thereon, he had named it Cockatoo Ranch; some whispers said to remind his wife of her lowly origin, but that was not true. Lem Sammis was a man of enduring sentiment. It was true that he had shouldered aside many men on his march up the hill, had broken not a few and never put scruple on his payroll, but it was undeniable that he had sentiment.

Flowers were blooming, sprinklers were going, and the lawn was clipped and green. Delia left the car on
the gravel a hundred feet from the mansion and started across. Three or four dogs came running at her. A woman with three chins who weighed two hundred pounds stopped trying to reach a lilac twig and yelled at the dogs. Delia went and shook hands with her.

It was Evelina. “I haven’t seen you for a coon’s age,” she declared, looking Delia over. “What you been crying about?”

“Nothing. I came to see Mr. Sammis.”

“First we’ll have some tea. If you’ve been crying you need it. Come over on the veranda. Oh, come on. One of the few things I like in all this damn business of putting on dog is this idea of afternoon tea. We’ll have some turkey sandwiches and potato salad.” She yelled at the top of her voice, “Pete!” and a Chinese appeared.

Delia, to her own surprise, ate. The sandwiches and salad were excellent. Lemuel Sammis himself came out of the house and joined them, accompanied by a tired-looking man whom Delia recognized as the State Commissioner of Public Works. The fact that Mrs. Sammis did a lot of talking seemed not to interfere with her eating. It began to appear to Delia that tea threatened to have a collision with dinner.

At length Sammis finished his third highball and arose. “You want to see me, Dellie? Come on in the house.”

Delia followed him. He was the only person who had ever called her Dellie besides her father. In a room with, among other things, an ornate desk, a wall lined with deluxe books, and four heads of bucks, mounted, as she knew, by her Uncle Quin, she sat and looked at him. He looked like Wyoming, with his lean old face, his tough oil-bereft skin, his watchful eyes withdrawn
behind their wrinkled ramparts from the cruel and brilliant sun. He inserted a thumb and finger into the small pocket of his flannel trousers and pulled out a little cylinder, apparently of gold, which looked like a lipstick holder; removing the cap, he shook it over his palm and a quill toothpick fell out. As he used it, his teeth looked as white as a coyote’s.

“Turkey gets in your teeth worse than chicken or beef,” he stated. “Seems to shred or something.” He flipped detritus from the point of the pick with a finger. “What’s on your mind, Dellie? I’ve got some important business to finish with that specimen of a man out there.”

“Clara.”

“What’s wrong with her? Sick?”

“She’s lost her job. Jackson fired her.”

The old man’s hand halted in midair, brandishing the toothpick like a miniature dagger. “When?” he demanded.

“Yesterday. She is to leave Saturday.”

“What for?”

“Jackson says they don’t get along together and that she’ll be better off somewhere else. I just saw him this afternoon and that’s all he said. My own opinion is that there’s somebody he wants there, I don’t know who, and it’s none of my business. But you know the whole country talks about his—the way he likes women.”

Lem Sammis looked uncomfortable. “At your age, Dellie, I should think that kind of talk …”

Delia nearly smiled. “I know, Mr. Sammis, you’re a prude and anyway I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I suspected you didn’t know about Clara’s being fired, and when I threatened to come to you about it and Jackson said he wished I wouldn’t, I was sure. He also said he
was the boss and he was running that office, which struck me as funny, because I always thought you were the real owner of it and always had been, even when the name on the door was Brand & Jackson.”

“So he’s the boss. Huh?”

“That’s what he said.”

Sammis leaned back in his chair and took in air with his mouth open, then expelled it by the same route, with a noise like a valve held open on an inflated tire. The duration of the noise spoke well for the condition of his lungs. His eyes behind their barricades were still the old Sammis poker eyes.

“Dellie,” he asked as if requesting a favor, “will you kindly tell me something? Will you kindly explain how my and my wife’s daughter Amy ever happened to stake a claim to a patch of alkali dust like Dan Jackson?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Sammis.”

“Neither do I and I never will.” The old man frowned at the toothpick, screwing up his lips.

After a moment Delia ventured, “And about Clara …”

“Sure, Clara. Him having the gall to fire Charlie Brand’s daughter! The fact is, I’ve about decided to give up grubstaking. I’m nearly seventy years old, and it’s no better than a dogfight with a bunch of pikers edging in, including that what’s-her-name woman buying off my men. I hear she’s just come back with another divorce. I can’t keep an eye on it any more.”

“You won’t close up the office!” Delia exclaimed in dismay.

“No, I guess not. I’d hate to see that old office shut up for good. As a matter of fact, I’d put Clara in charge if I could think of anything else to do with Dan Jackson.”
He added bitterly, “I might put him to renting rowboats out on Pyramid Lake.”

“Then Clara won’t be fired?”

“She will not. No, ma’am. I’ll see Dan maybe tonight, or more likely tomorrow.” He got up. “It’s going on six o’clock and I don’t want that fellow staying for supper. Anything else on your mind, Dellie?”

“Yes. I’d like to have the satisfaction—I have a particular reason for wanting to get this done today, done and finished. Just a personal reason. Of course I know you’ll see to it, since you say you will—but if you’d write a note, just a line, I’d like to take it to Jackson myself. I can write it on a typewriter if you want me to, and you can sign it …”

Sammis cackled down at her. “Why, you derned little long-legged heifer! Don’t trust me, huh? Think Dan might talk me out of it?”

“No,” she protested, “certainly not! It’s just a personal reason!”

He glanced at her keenly. “You’re not saying you have anything personal with Dan Jackson?”

“Oh, no, heavens no, not personal with him. Just personal.”

He looked at her a moment, then sat at the desk and reached for a sheet of paper. “All right, I’ll make it plain enough so he can understand it,” he said, and began writing.

D
elia didn’t get away from Cockatoo Ranch until nearly seven o’clock, and then with difficulty, on account of Evelina’s determined insistence that she should stay for supper. As she steered the car into the highway, the note signed by Lemuel Sammis was beneath her dress, pinned to her underwear. She couldn’t put it in her handbag because she had none, and didn’t want to trust it to the dashboard compartment because she would be getting out of the car at the cemetery and there was no way of locking it.

It was beginning to cool off as the sun prepared to call it a day and take to the hills.

The question, now what, as regarded her ultimate design, was still waiting for an answer, and it was for that, half consciously, that she was going to the cemetery. She drove some twenty minutes and, a mile or so before she reached Cody, turned into a side road and skirted the city. When she arrived at the cemetery entrance she left the car there and entered on foot, since the gate for vehicles would be locked by the caretaker at sundown. Two cars that had been inside were leaving, and there was no one around.

Her father’s and mother’s graves, with modest
headstones, were side by side, and the plot was neat and creditable, with grass and flowers and four little evergreen shrubs. Delia read the inscriptions, as she always did on arriving, stood a while, and then sat on the turf at the edge of the plot and took off her hat.

She sat there nearly two hours.

Still no answer was forthcoming. Objectively considered, it might have appeared far-fetched, and even ridiculous, that one resolved on so supreme a retaliation as the taking of life could be completely disconcerted by having her handbag stolen from her car seat, but such seemed to be the case. Surely one could buy or borrow another gun, or use a knife to stab with, or devise from all the possibilities some workable method. But Delia could not, or did not, even get her mind focused on the question as a practical problem, though it was at that very spot, some days before, that her original determination had crystallized.

Her thoughts staggered around. She did not cling morbidly to misery and affliction and rancor, but shock and grief had overburdened her and her blood did not readily assimilate distress. She thought of the time two years ago when Lem Sammis had appeared at their home in the middle of the night and gone with her mother to the front room and her mother had collapsed, and the two girls had not learned until morning that their father had been murdered in a remote prospector’s cabin in the Silverside hills. She thought of seeing him in his coffin and her mother collapsing again; and then those dreary months, inexpressibly dreary because for so long her mother would not forget or let them forget, or offer any welcome to time’s desire to obliterate. But after nearly two years her mother had begun to seem reluctantly willing that a curtain should be drawn, and to permit the existence of
today and the probability of tomorrow; she had one evening laughed aloud at some story Clara brought home; and then, three months ago, the new evil had come, insidious, lacking the brutal instantaneity of a bullet in the heart, but no less deadly. Delia had not ever pretended, and did not now, that she had actually comprehended that evil, but she had known it was there; and certainly she had seen with her own eyes its consequences, since it was she who had gone into the bedroom that morning a month ago, after Clara had left for the office, and found her mother dead, poisoned in the night by her own hand.