Rex Stout (26 page)

“No. If I had I wouldn’t have come to ask you about it.”

“But you did come to ask me, trying to keep it casual, without telling me what I would be letting myself in for.” Her pupils were contracted, though she was not facing the sunlight, and her voice had an edge. “I was under the impression that I’m a client of your firm? That I’ve paid you a satisfactory retainer?”

“You wouldn’t be letting yourself in—”

“No? Really, Mr. Dillon. It sounds as if the least I could expect would be the witness chair in a murder case, which would be—shall I say inconvenient?”

“But I’m only asking—confidentially—”

“Oh, no. You’re cheating. If I admitted I had written such a paper, and its being found under the body of a murdered man made my testimony vital as to whom I had given it to, would you still keep it confidential?”

“In that case I’d ask you—”

“Of course. You’d ask me to testify, and I’d refuse, and I’d get a subpoena to appear written on white paper
with black ink. Here’s the ice. Have another highball.” She poured and mixed. “It’ll brighten you up. You’ve only partly satisfied my curiosity. For instance, how did the prospector know the writing on the paper was mine?”

“He didn’t.”

“Then who else saw the paper?”

“No one that I know of.”

Her brows lifted. “Did you do it with mirrors?”

“I showed Hurley an envelope you addressed to me and he said the writing was identical. The word ‘mountain.’ ”

“Ah! Then you already suspected me by intuition? Whose? Not yours?”

“It was an accident. I happened to have that envelope in my pocket with others.” Ty hadn’t picked up his second highball. “You are wrong, Mrs. Cowles, if you think there was the slightest intention of causing you any trouble—”

“Oh, I don’t! No trouble at all. Just the key witness in a notorious murder case.” She shivered delicately. “This prospector must be quite a handwriting expert. I’d love to see the paper. What happened to it?”

“Hurley gave it to Dan Jackson Tuesday morning. That night Jackson was killed and the paper taken from him.”

Wynne Cowles’s glass had been started toward her mouth, but was halted midway on its course. Then it went on to its contact with her warm firm lips, and she drank. She put it on the table. “Well!” she said. “Not just one murder. Two murders. Thank you so much!”

“You’re welcome.” Ty leaned forward to her. “I’m a first class boob. I’ve messed this all up. I had brains enough to know you wouldn’t want to be mixed up in a murder trial, no one does, but I should have gone on
from there and considered what kind of an appeal would be effective with you. I should have told you the whole thing to begin with and then put it to you: we need your help. The Brand girls need it. You say Delia is a nice kid. That’s putting it mildly. I heard you at the courthouse, day before yesterday, offering Clara your assistance up to any amount. I know you meant money, but money isn’t what they need. Your information, who you gave that paper to, is absolutely vital. It’s the only trail we have—”

“You’re assuming as a fact that I wrote such a paper.”

“Well, you did. Didn’t you?”

“No.”

“You didn’t write that on a piece of paper and put your initials on it, WD?”

“No.”

He looked straight at her eyes and said, “I don’t believe it.” She shrugged. He said, “What you mean is that you did write it, but the paper can’t be produced as evidence, so you propose to avoid inconvenience and notoriety by denying it. If you mean that, why don’t you say so and I’ll know where I stand? We’re here alone.”

She shrugged again. “I’ll say that if you’d like it better. Delia has been released from jail, hasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any danger of her being arrested again?”

“No. I think not.”

“And you told me Clara isn’t going to be arrested. They are already having their inconvenience and notoriety, but that can’t be helped. So I’ll say this: if I had written such a paper, and if I thought it would convict a murderer for me to admit it and get summoned to a
courtroom and testify on the stand about it, I wouldn’t do it. Does that let you know where you stand?”

“It does,” said Ty bitterly. “It lets me know where you stand, too.”

“I know.” She grimaced, and picked up her drink. “I’m a cockatrice, a mugger, a harpy—hell, I’m a mountain cat. I don’t mind. I don’t like murderers, but I’m not crazy about hangmen either. Maybe I’m an anarchist. You have not touched your drink.”

“I don’t want it. Listen, Mrs. Cowles. Tell me in confidence and I swear you can trust me—”

“You’re in love. I’d be a fool to trust you. No.”

“Damn it, you offered to help Clara—”

“I’ll help her. How much?”

He kept it up ten minutes longer, but it was futile. All he got was a few scratches from the mountain cat’s claws. He lost his temper, and he left without it.

He drove back to Cody in thirty-five minutes, narrowly missing a collision with a flock of sheep in Engel’s Gulch. It was a quarter to five when he turned into the Brand driveway on Vulcan Street. Delia opened the door for him. His face answered her question before she asked it, and she proved her right to some rarer appellation than “nice kid” by not asking it.

“Did you lie down?” Ty demanded.

She shook her head. “I just fooled around. Wishing I had gone with you.”

“It’s just as well you didn’t. Mountain cat? She’s a hyena. Come and sit down and I’ll tell you about it.”

When he had finished, leaving nothing out, he sat and stared at her miserably, glum, licked. Her lips were moving, nervously jerking, and she put her teeth on the lower one to stop it.

“I did it wrong,” he said. “I’m a fish. I’m a goddamn worm. Two words from her was all I needed, and I
muffed the chance. If I’d had an ounce of brains I’d have figured it out better. Like this: either she had a hand in the murder of your father or she didn’t. If she did, she already knew about that paper and it didn’t matter what kind of an approach I made, nothing would drag an admission from her. But if she had nothing to do with the murder, which we had agreed to suppose, then the approach made all the difference, because she couldn’t have known why I was asking about that paper. I could have cooked up a plausible tale that wouldn’t have alarmed her, and she would have told me. Now she’s on guard, and there’s not a chance. It was our one measly lead and I’ve thrown it away.”

“You did your best, Ty.”

“If that’s my best, my worst would be a world’s record.”

“You think she does remember writing it and what she did with it?”

“I know she does. A million to one.”

“Do you still think she had nothing—that she didn’t—?”

“The murder? I don’t know. But ten to one she had nothing to do with it. Why would she? Can you conceive of any reason?”

“No.” Delia slowly shook her head. “No. We should have been smarter. We weren’t clever enough.”

“I know. You can’t possibly feel as much contempt for me as I feel for myself.”

“I don’t feel contempt for you, Ty.”

“You should.” They sat and said nothing.

Finally he heaved a deep sigh that shook his frame. “Well,” he said grimly, “now for the next mistake. I’d like to make this a grand one. What good would it do to take it to the county attorney? Even if he’s on the level and wanted to put the screws on Wynne Cowles, how
could he? There’s no evidence except Squint Hurley’s word that there ever was such a paper, and even less that she wrote it. Do you believe Hurley told the truth?”

“Yes.”

“So do I.” Ty abruptly got up. “I’m sunk. I’m grabbing for straws and there aren’t any. The only gleam of hope I see is to go and put it up to Phil Escott. I wish to God I had done that instead of beating it to Broken Circle Ranch with my chin stuck out. Have you heard anything from Clara?”

“I phoned about an hour ago. They wouldn’t let me talk to her, but they said she would be home for dinner at seven o’clock.”

“She has no car there. Shall I go after her?”

“They said they’d bring her.”

“I’ll put that up to Escott, too. They can’t keep on hounding her. Will you let a high-grade moron kiss you?”

She put up her face. He kissed her, not as one who deserved it, pulled away and strode to the door, where he turned. “God, Del. I’m sorry.”

“It’s as much my fault as yours, Ty. Phone me after you’ve talked to Escott.”

After she heard the front door close behind him she buried her face in her hands, her elbows on her knees, and stayed that way a long time. She wasn’t crying; she didn’t feel like crying. There was no energy or purpose left in her; her nerves and brain and muscles all were flabby with fatigue. There was no coherence in anything; nothing in the world, within or without, had any significance. She was, in fact, about to surrender to a state of unconsciousness which could only by euphemism have been called by so sweet a name as sleep, when suddenly something happened in her brain which
made her lift her head. There was, after all, something significant, something which she told herself she must remember to do that very day. What could it be? She frowned. What was it? Oh, yes, of course. Butter. There was no butter in the house, and she had neglected to order it with the other things on the phone.

Her brain struggled desperately with the question of butter, and finally solved it with the heroic decision to go to the Vulcan Market two blocks away and get some. She got to her feet and her knees held her up. Good. She went to the drawer in the dining room where she usually put her handbag, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the kitchen. Upstairs then. No. The county attorney had it. That recollection threatened to floor her mind again with a thousand urgencies more pressing than butter, but she had decided to get some butter. They carried no account at the Vulcan Market, and she needed cash. She needed cash anyway, and there was no telling when she would get her handbag back.

She trudged to the stairs and ascended, helping herself with her hand on the rail, and went to her bedroom. She closed the door behind her because that was her habit whenever she entered there with the intention of opening that drawer. From the dark corner of a shelf in the closet, between the folds of a scarf, she got the key, and with it unlocked the top drawer of the bureau which stood between the windows.

Butter nearly got abandoned again, for that drawer was all she had of treasure. The silver spurs her father had given her, the clippings from the
Times-Star
praising her performances in high school plays, the soda fountain straw through which she and Ty Dillon had both sipped root beer one day a year ago (Ty would have given something, any time those twelve months,
to have known it was there), many letters, and especially the letters her mother had written her on various occasions.…

She resolutely fought the memories back and reached to a box at the rear of the drawer for a brown paper envelope, opened the flap and inserted her fingers, and extracted a twenty-dollar bill. The mere sight of it was enough, momentarily, to cause one memory to crowd out all the others—the story Rufus Toale had told her as he died, only the night before. Involuntarily she looked at the bill in her hand, and even turned it over and looked at the other side. Then she gaped. Her mouth dropped open and her eyes bulged in an idiot stare. In the upper right hand corner of the bill, small and faint but unmistakably there, were two letters in fine script: R.T. It was God’s money.

S
he stood and stared at the bill for twenty heartbeats, then the hand holding it dropped to her side and she stood and stared at nothing. Her nerves and muscles and brain, no longer flabby from fatigue, were galvanized with horror.

She went to the window and thrust aside the curtain and looked at the bill in the direct sunlight. Nothing could be made of the inscription but R.T. It was R.T. and nothing else. And that was the only twenty in the envelope; the others were all tens and fives. Or were they? She flew to the drawer, standing open, and got the envelope and removed the contents, and fingered the bills one by one. Yes. All tens and fives. Then that was the only twenty, and she knew definitely, irrevocably, where it had come from. She had known anyway, since she had taken it from the top, the last one she had put there, six weeks ago, when she had received it as a birthday present. She returned the twenty to the envelope and took out a ten, replaced the envelope in the box and closed the drawer and locked it, put the key back on the closet shelf, and sat down in a chair.

This was grotesque and not to be believed.

She could go and say, “The twenty-dollar bill you gave me on my birthday is one of those taken from Dad when he was murdered. Where did you get it?” As Ty had gone to Wynne Cowles to ask about the paper. With no result. What if she got the same? No.

She could phone Ty and ask him to come, and show it to him and tell him. Then he would … No. Two days ago she had herself been thought guilty of murder by people who loved her. No. She must first, somehow, find out herself. She could think. She must think.

Her father two years ago. Two hours to drive to Sugarbowl. Two hours across the hills to the Ghost Canyon cabin, if you hurried, if you had a desperate purpose. Four hours to return. Possible? She forced her brain to recall everything from that day. Yes, possible.

Dan Jackson Tuesday night. Possible? So far as she knew, quite possible. And besides, there was the fact, what she herself had seen … good God. Rufus Toale’s God, whose errand he had brought to her. She gulped. More than possible. She stiffened her jaw again.

Rufus Toale last night. No fact there which she herself had seen, but no disproof, no veto. Then it was all possible. She could say, she could ask.… No, she couldn’t do that either. There must be no bungling about this, and no one could be confided in, and no one could be trusted to help figure out a way. But there must be a way. There had to be. She had to find out, and she had to find out quick. There could be no eating or sleeping or facing anyone until she did find out. But she mustn’t make a mistake. She mustn’t make a wild stab and be left where she was now, as they had done with Wynne Cowles—