Rex Stout (8 page)

“I don’t want to see anyone, please,” said Clara as Evelina made off in her stocking feet.

But it became evident in less than a minute that Evelina had met her match at the front door. Her raised voice was heard, and other footsteps approaching down the hall, and when Clara lifted her head a young man was standing there.

“Oh.” She nodded.

As the man opened his mouth to speak Evelina appeared. “He shoved past,” she declared indignantly. “I grabbed for him, but he tore loose—”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Sammis,” said Clara. “This is Mr. Dillon. Tyler Dillon.”

“Oh, Phil Escott’s fellow from the coast?” She put out a hand and they shook. “Looks like a smart colt. If he’s staying I guess I’ll be getting back over to Amy’s. Would you mind handing me those shoes?”

Dillon stooped for them, gallantly offered to put them on and did so, using the handle of a teaspoon. She thanked him, stamped with each foot, grimacing, told Clara not to worry and that she would phone in case she heard anything from Lem, and departed. Dillon went to open the front door for her. When he returned he moved the kitchen chair around and sat on it and said, “That was Mrs. Lemuel Sammis?”

Clara nodded.

“I hear she’s clever.”

“I guess she is.”

“What did she want?”

“She’s my godmother. Delia’s too. She wanted to cheer me up and make me eat.”

Dillon frowned. He looked as if he needed fully as
much cheering up as Clara did. “I tried to get you on the phone three or four times.”

“I haven’t been going to the phone. Mr. Sammis told me not to.”

“When did you see him?”

“Down at the sheriffs office about seven o’clock. They had me there asking me questions, and when he came he made them stop.” Clara shifted on the bench to look straight at him. “He advised me not to see anyone, too. I don’t mind seeing you, but I suppose I shouldn’t be answering questions. Have you seen her?”

“No. Sammis has frozen me out. Harvey Anson has been retained as her lawyer. They won’t let me see her. I didn’t learn about it until breakfast time, when I looked at the paper. It damn near laid me out, after—” He stopped.

“After what?”

“Nothing. I’ve been trying to get to her for over two hours. Welch, the deputy warden, told me a little while ago she was asleep and his wife was with her. Have you seen her?”

“Yes.” Clara swallowed. “They let me be with her nearly half an hour, after Mr. Sammis came.”

“What did she say?”

“She said—she told me where she went and what she did last evening, and of course she said she didn’t shoot Jackson, but any fool would know that.”

Dillon stared. “Do you mean to say you think she didn’t do it?”

Clara stared back and said with quiet bitterness, “My God.”

“My God what?”

“Do
you
think Delia would murder a man?”

“No. I didn’t think so. But maybe I know things
about it you don’t know. Have you seen your uncle? Quinby Pellett?”

“Yes, I saw him at the jail. What about him?”

“Didn’t he tell you anything?”

“He told me he knew Delia didn’t shoot Jackson. Naturally, since he has a decent share of brains. What else could he tell me?”

“Nothing if he didn’t want to. Do you know where Delia’s handbag is? Did she have it with her and did they take it?”

Clara’s mouth opened and then closed again. She regarded him with narrowed eyes. “What do you know about her handbag?”

“I know there was a paper in it that would help to convict her, with my name on it.”

“How do you know that?”

“In my office yesterday morning she took it from the handbag and read it to me and put it back again.”

“A paper that would help … to convict her?”

“Yes.”

Clara shoved the untouched plate away, so suddenly that one of the eggs skidded onto the table. Throughout her childhood and girlhood it had been a truism in the Brand family that Clara had no nerves, but she too had tragically lost a father and a mother … and now this … Disregarding the egg, she slid off the end of the bench, stood up, and said quietly, “I think you had better go. If you’re a big enough fool to think she did it, or a big enough something—I don’t know what. Go and look for that paper you want that will help to convict her.”

Dillon stayed on the chair and said with equal quietness, “I’m not a fool. I love her.”

“You certainly sound like it. You’d better go.”

He shook his head. “I can’t go. I’ve got to do something
and I can’t do it without you. You know I love her and you know she turned me down, and I love her so much I think I always am going to love her, and I think by God I’m going to marry her some day. If that makes me a fool, okay. She came to my office yesterday and said she was going to shoot a man. Kill him. She wanted legal advice. She said she had just bought a box of cartridges. She had a gun in her handbag, she took it out and I saw it. She said it was her father’s gun. I accused her of being dramatic. You know? And she walked out on me with her shoulders up. You know how she can walk with her shoulders up?”

“But she couldn’t … she couldn’t …” Clara sank onto the end of the bench. “She couldn’t possibly have meant it.”

“That’s what I thought. Though I did go to your uncle and put it to him. I should have followed her or taken her to you or done something! How do you think I felt when I saw that headline in the paper?”

“I don’t believe it. She never did it. And anyway, if she had intended—if she had hated anyone that much, it wouldn’t have been Jackson.”

“Why not? Who would it have been?”

“I don’t—I don’t know. But it couldn’t have been—”

“You do know. You know something. Who?”

She slowly shook her head.

He exploded. “Damn it, Clara, I tell you I love her and I tell you she’s in terrible danger! I tell you I’ve got to do something! If it’s her secret, or yours, I’ll keep it. You’ve left her to Sammis just because he’s your godfather. How do you know you can trust him? Jackson was his partner, and he’s as ruthless as a mountain cat when he wants to be. I’ve got to know all
there is to know. If Delia wanted to kill somebody and it wasn’t Jackson, who was it?”

“She never told me she wanted to kill him.”

“She told me. Who was it?”

“Rufus Toale.”

He gaped in astonishment. “Toale?” He stared. “The preacher?”

“Yes.”

“Good lord, why?”

“Because she thought he drove my mother to suicide. So did I.”

“Drove her how?”

“By talking to her.” Clara pressed her teeth to her lip and was silent. In a little she continued in a controlled voice, “I don’t want—you have no idea—how excessively painful it is to talk about it.”

“Oh, yes. I have. I’ve learned a few things about pain myself. What did he talk to her about?”

“I don’t know. Mother had always been a member of his church, but with no special—nothing special. She just went there to church and had him to dinner once or twice a year. Then about three months ago, when mother had begun to get more—well, healthier—about father’s death, Toale began coming to see her. They had long confidential talks, day after day. From the time it started she began to look like—I don’t know how to say it—there was doom and death in her eyes. She wouldn’t tell Delia and me about it, not a word. We tried to eavesdrop, to sneak where we could hear, but they were too careful. We never found out.”

“What did you think it was?”

“Delia thought it was some kind of hold he had got on mother, she couldn’t guess what, and he was deliberately torturing her. I thought he was torturing her too, I could see he was, but on account of her long
effort, all the time and energy and money she spent, trying to find out who had killed father. He preached a sermon on the wickedness of revenge soon after he started coming to see mother. He’s a fanatic, you know. It got worse and worse with mother, it got so she would hardly talk to us about anything or hardly eat. Then one morning Delia went in her room and found her. Of course Delia’s reaction was different from mine, because we are different, but I think another reason was that it was Delia who took a cup of coffee to her room and found her dead.”

“So you think—when she told me she intended to shoot a man—she meant Toale.”

“I’m sure she did.” Clara locked her fingers together. “Another thing, I’m afraid I made it worse, just recently. One evening two weeks ago he came here to see me. Delia didn’t want me to let him in, but I did, and I let him talk to me then and two or three times since, because I thought maybe he would let it out about mother. I asked him pointblank what he had talked so often with mother about and he said her secrets rested with her in the grave. He said he wanted to labor with me to return me to God. I hadn’t been going to church since he had started coming to see mother. I couldn’t stand it to sit and look at him and listen to him.”

“How did that make it worse?”

“Because … I got a notion that Delia thought Rufus Toale was beginning to do to me what he had done to mother. I told her I was sort of stringing him along, or trying to, but I should have realized, the condition she was in about Rufus Toale, that that wouldn’t reassure her. Mother had evaded our questions about him for two months.”

Dillon gazed at her, frowning deeply, considering.

“But,” he offered finally, “while she may have hated Toale enough to want to kill him, what if she hated Jackson that much too?”

“Why should she?”

“Well, what if … what if she …?” He couldn’t get it out. He demanded savagely, “Did you read the paper? Did you get all the hints? Do you know what the whole damned town is saying? About Jackson and women?”

“What has that got to do with Delia?”

Dillon blurted, “Is she a woman?”

“Oh, you mean … Oh.” Clara compressed her lips, then opened them to say, “You’re a swell lover, you are. You’re a hot one. First you accuse her of murder and now you accuse her of being one of Dan Jackson’s women—”

“I don’t accuse her of anything!” The misery in his eyes was in fact anything but accusatory. “But good God, what am I going to think? What am I going to believe? What do you suppose I came here for? What in the name of heaven was she doing in Jackson’s office at night with a gun in her hand?”

“The gun was there on a chair and she picked it up.”

“What was she doing there?”

“She went to give Jackson a note, signed by Mr. Sammis, instructing him to keep me employed there. Jackson had fired me.”

“Who told you that?”

“She did and Mr. Sammis did.”

“Did you see the note?”

“No, I think the sheriff has it. But anybody who thinks Delia had anything to do with Jackson—that’s utter nonsense. Or me either. I got those dirty hints in the paper, but I thought they were aimed at me. Neither
Delia or I would have let Dan Jackson touch us with a ten-foot pole—what’s the idea?”

He had jumped to his feet and pounced at her. “Shake!” He seized her hand and crunched the bones. “Put it there! What the hell! Dear sweet darling beautiful Clara! I’m going to set that—”

“I’m not your darling and you broke my knuckles.”

“Okay. Excuse me.” He grabbed her hand again, planted a kiss on the back of it and sat down on the bench opposite her. “There. Now I can fight with my heart in it. If I can make my brain work. What was it—Oh, yes! You say the gun was there on a chair. How did it get from her handbag onto the chair?”

“Her handbag was there too, lying on the desk.”

“All right, who took the gun out?”

“She doesn’t know. Nobody knows. The handbag with the gun and cartridges in it had been stolen from the car in the afternoon while it was parked on Halley Street.”

“Who says so?”

“She does.”

“How did she get it back?”

“She didn’t get it back. The first she saw it again, when she went to Jackson’s office to give him that note, he was there dead and the handbag was on the desk and the gun was on a chair.”

Dillon stared with bulging eyes. “She didn’t take the handbag to the office at all?”

“Certainly not, how could she? She didn’t have it. It had been stolen.”

“And it was there when she … and the gun … good God.” Dillon’s mouth worked. “Then look here. It’s worse even … so that’s what it’s like! And you’ve turned her over to the mercy of Lem Sammis.”

“You said something like that before,” Clara protested.
“He wouldn’t do anything to hurt Delia. I’m sure he wouldn’t.”

“Maybe not. You may be sure, but I’m not. That kind of man feels about people the way a general feels about soldiers. He loves them and he’s proud of them, and he’s especially proud of them when they die for the side he’s leading. That’s natural; it’s part of the make-up of a good general. Jackson was Sammis’s partner and son-in-law. There’s no telling what politics or what kind of plot is behind this. I said we’ve got to do something, and I say it now louder than ever. The chief thing I came here for—I got more than I expected and thank God I did—the chief thing was that I want to be Delia’s counsel.”

“You mean her lawyer?”

“That’s it.”

“But Mr. Sammis has already engaged Harvey Anson.”

“I know he has, but listen. In the first place, no matter what you think, you can’t be sure of Sammis, especially with that planting of her handbag. I tell you she’s in terrible danger. In the second place, that paper I spoke of that she read to me yesterday—my name was on it and it was a long question about the consequences of committing murder. If I’m her counsel I can’t be asked about it and I think I could keep it out of evidence, and if I don’t it would convince any jury that she did actually premeditate murder. Of course you could go on the stand and testify that it was really Rufus Toale she thought she wanted to kill and give the reasons why …”

Clara closed her eyes and shuddered.

“Sure, I know,” Dillon said. “But what else could you do? And the chances are the jury wouldn’t believe you anyway. It’s a pretty queer story if you don’t know
Delia and all the circumstances. It would be a big advantage if we could keep that paper and her visit to me out of it. Maybe you think I’m too inexperienced to trust her life to, but the firm would be counsel of record—Escott, Brody and Dillon and old Escott is as good as Harvey Anson any day. You’re her nearest relative and you can designate the firm—shall I answer that?”