by Rex Stout
“Dang [AG] Brodell,” he didn’t say.
“It can’t be done,” Pete Ingalls said. “He’s dead and buried.”
“It was me that said the atrocious [AG] scourge [AG] might marry her, and that shows what a misguided [AG] ignoramus [AG] I was.”
“I thought you were showing understanding and compassion,” Pete said.
“Balls. I said how I figured it. You know what I said. You’re a lot younger than I am and you’re bigger and stronger, but if I sit here and cross my legs good, let’s see you get them opened up. Every breathing [AG] female [AG] alive is a born siren [AG]. The reason I called him an atrocious [AG] scourge [AG] was because he didn’t belong here and all the panting [AG] dudes can thumping [AG] well leave their outstanding [AG] bats [AG] at home when they���”
Oh piffle [AG], that’s enough. Censorship is too much work. I couldn’t leave him out because he was there, but that will have to do for him. Wolfe stood it a little longer-he can stand anything if there’s any chance it will help-and then stopped him by saying in a tone that had stopped better men with better vocabularies, “Thank you, Mr Lake, for illustrating so well what I said about words. Mr Ingalls. You have demonstrated that you have a supply of words too, less colourful. Mr Goodwin has told me that you traded much more than twenty of them with Mr Brodell.”
“Last year,” Pete said. “I didn’t see him this year. I presume Archie has told you I agree with him on Harvey, but I’ve got a better reason. Harvey won’t kill a fellow creature unless he intends to eat it. He doesn’t even take shots at coyotes. The first year I was here, a horse broke a leg and had to be shot, and Harvey couldn’t do it, and Mel had to. Now a man with an established psychological pattern like that, he might kill a man on a sudden irresistible impulse, but to suppose he would deliberately take a rifle and go hunting for a man and gun him down, that’s just ridiculous. I know enough about-”
“If you please.” Wolfe’s tone wasn’t the one he had stopped Emmett with, but it served. “Mr Greve needs a liberator, not an advocate. You were with Mr Brodell frequently last summer?”
Pete turned both palms up. He had a wide assortment of gestures. “I wouldn’t say with. It’s not the same thing, being with a man and merely being where he is. He was impressed by me, he sought me out, because he knew my father is a successful businessman-he’s in real estate-and I’m doing advanced work in paleontology, and Brodell wanted to know how I broke loose. That was his phrase, ‘break loose.’ He wanted to break loose from his father and his newspaper, and his father wouldn’t let him.”
“What did he want to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nonsense. Only a saint wants to do nothing.”
Pete grinned. “Man, that’s good. I like that. It’s not true, but I like it. Who said it?”
“I did.”
“But who said it first?”
“I seldom let another man speak for me, and when I do I name him.”
“I’ll look it up, and if I find it I’ll send you a crow to eat. But I take it back about Brodell wanting to do nothing. I should have said his one strong push was negative. I think a lot of people are in that pinch; there’s something they want not to do so intensely that they can’t take time to consider what they do want to do. As for Brodell, I more or less avoided him. I mean, when he wanted to arrange a double date for us with a couple of girls in Timberburg I declined with thanks. Things like that. Actually I saw very little of him except Saturday nights at Woody’s-once or twice I ran across him at Vawter’s, or he ran across me-and once four of us spent an evening at a bowling alley in Timberburg. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but he was dull. A very dull man. I had a thought about him the day after he died: I doubt if he ever stirred anybody. He was thirty-five years old. It took him perhaps one minute to die, or even less, but he probably stirred more people, he caused more excitement, in that one minute of dying than in all his thirty-five years of living. That’s a dismal thought either about life or about him. I figured it. There are eighteen million, three hundred and ninety-six thousand minutes in thirty-five years. You told us to talk about Philip Brodell and his death. Well, if I tried all day I couldn’t say anything truer about him than that. That’s a hell of an obituary.”
“And surely not deserved,” Wolfe said. “He must have stirred Miss Greve. Unless you say, as Mr Lake would, that she stirred him.”
“It’s a point.” Pete pursed his lips to consider it. “But it’s just semantics. ‘Stirred.’ Shall we debate it, does a girl have to be stirred before she’ll let a man take her? Of course not. Some of them are, but only a minority; most of them let the apron up because they’ve been curious about it so long. I wish I knew Alma well enough to ask her. I don’t believe she was stirred. She had built up a good defence against being stirred, but curiosity is often so strong that no man or woman can resist it. Working with fossils, I have had the thought that probably back in the Devonian, or even in the Silurian-Hi, Alma.”
She had opened a door and stepped in. Four of us stood up. The custom of standing up when a female enters is hanging on longer in Montana than in Manhattan, and of course when Mel and Emmett did, Pete and I did too. Wolfe did not. He almost never does when a woman enters his office, and he had broken so many rules in the past three days that it must have given him real satisfaction to be able to stick to one. He had been introduced to Alma, and to Carol and Flora, when we arrived.
“Come and get it,” Alma said, “before the grease sets.” She had probably heard that summons to a meal before she grew teeth.
Mel went to wash his hands and the rest of us went to the dining room, which had been added on at Carol’s request when Lily had had things done to the house. There was plenty of room at the long table; there were times when as many as four or five extra men had to be fed. Wolfe was put between Carol and Alma, and I was across from him and had a good view of his reaction to the tomato soup out of a can. He got it down all right, all of it, and the only thing noticeable was noticed only by me: that he carefully did not permit me to catch his eye. Flora was with us, between Mel and Emmett, and she helped Carol and Alma take out the soup plates and bring in dishes of mashed potatoes, string beans, and creamed onions. Then the real Montana trout deal, served by Carol and Alma from big trays. The longest and biggest foil bundle went to Wolfe. I had told him you didn’t transfer it onto your plate; you just opened it up and pitched in. Which he did, after the women had sat and started theirs. His was a fine fish, a fat fifteen-inch rainbow Lily had caught, which she had shown me with pride, and I hoped it was cooked through. He used his knife and fork on it expertly, conveyed a bite to his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Remarkable.”
That settled it; I would have to hit him for a raise. If redeeming me was worth that, I was being underpaid.
Chapter 9
Nero Wolfe said to Woodrow Stepanian, “No. After full consideration I might agree with you. I meant only what I said, that a majority of your fellow citizens would not.”
It was twenty minutes to nine. We were in the middle section of the Hall of Culture, called the Gallery by Lily. The doors to the sections you had to pay to enter were both closed; the movie wasn’t over and the romp hadn’t started. Only one fact of importance had been acquired at the Bar JR: that trout baked in foil with ham, brown sugar, onions, and Worcestershire sauce was digestible. If we had got one from Mel or Emmett or Pete I didn’t know it. I had got one from Saul Panzer, when I had called him on the Greves’ phone. If Philip Brodell, on his visits to New York, had ever run into Diana Kadany or Wade Worthy, Saul had found no trace of it and thought the chance that there was one to be found was slim.
What Wolfe was saying he might agree with was something Woody had said regarding one of the items hanging on the wall back of Woody’s desk-a big card in a homemade frame which said in homemade lettering by Woody:
“ALL RIGHT, THEN,
I’LL GO TO HELL”
Huckleberry Finn
by M
ark Twain
Wolfe had asked why that had been chosen for display in a frame and Woody had said because he thought it was the greatest sentence in American literature. Wolfe had asked why he thought that, and Woody had replied because it said the most important thing about America, that no man had to let anybody else decide things for him, and what made it such a wonderful sentence was that it wasn’t a man who said it, it was a boy who had never read any books, and that showed that he was born with it because he was American.
I had an errand to do, but I stayed to listen because I thought I might learn something either about America or about literature. When Wolfe said that a majority of Woody’s fellow citizens wouldn’t agree with him Woody asked him what they would regard as a greater sentence, and Wolfe said, “I could suggest a dozen or more, but the most likely one is also displayed on your wall.” He pointed to the framed Declaration of Indepedence. ” ‘All men are created equal.’ “
Woody nodded. “Of course that’s great, but it’s a lie. With all respect. It’s a good lie for a good purpose, but it’s a lie.”
“Not in that context. As a biological premise it would be worse than a lie, it would be absurd, but as a weapon in a mortal combat it was potent and true. It was meant not to convince but to confound.” Wolfe pointed again. “What’s that?”
“That” was another hand-lettered item in a frame, but I can’t show it to you because I didn’t have a camera with me. Apparently it was eight or nine words, but what kind? The two words below, smaller, were “Stephen Orbelian.”
“That is older,” Woody said. “About seven hundred years old. I’m not sure it is great, but I have much affection for it because it is very subtle. It was written by that man, Stephen Orbelian, in ancient classical Armenian, and it says simply, ‘I love my country because it is mine.’ But of course it is not simple at all. It is very subtle. It means more different things than you would think possible for only eight words. With all respect, may I ask if you agree?”
Wolfe grunted. “I agree that it’s subtle. Extraordinary. Let’s sit and discuss it.”
I wasn’t invited to help, so I left to do the errand, which was merely a chauffeuring chore, driving the station wagon to the cabin to supply transportation for Lily and Diana and Wade Worthy. My expectation was that Lily and Wade would be in the big room, ready, but Diana wouldn’t, and that was how I found it. Of course nine women out of ten are late leavers and arrivers, but with Diana it wasn’t only that. She had to make entrances. She never just came to the kitchen at breakfast time; she entered. Without an audience, an entrance is merely an arrival, and the bigger the audience the better. The arrangement had been that I would come for them a little after nine. If Diana had been dressed and her face-work done at nine o’clock, she would have waited in her room until she heard the car, and in the hall until she heard me inside. So I was there telling Lily and Wade that the real Montana trout deal had gone down fine when Diana glided in, a treat for any audience in a red silky thing that started late at the top but nearly made it to her ankles at the bottom. Lily, who didn’t sneer at audiences but had different ideas, was in a pale pink shirt and white slacks.
Back at Lame Horse there was no parking room left in front, so I circled around Vawter’s to a secluded spot by the rear platform of the store, and we walked to the front through the passage between the two buildings. When we entered I wasn’t expecting Wolfe to be visible. We had asked Woody for permission to use his living quarters in the back, and he had given it, with all respect, and the arrangement was that I would escort Sam Peacock there whenever I found, or made, an opportunity. But there he was, on a chair about half wide enough, by the rear wall, and he had company. The law was never much in evidence at the Hall of Culture’s Saturday nights because the precautions Woody took never let anyone get out of hand. Now and then a uniformed state cop would drop in for a look, and that was all. But that evening not only was Sheriff Morley Haight there, on a chair some three steps to the right of Wolfe, but also one of his deputies, a well-weathered specimen with the kind of shoulders Haight wished he had, whose name was Ed Welch. He was standing over near the door at the right, where the man with the till was posted. Diana and Wade headed for that door, but Lily, beside me, looked at the deputy, then at the sheriff, and asked me, loud enough for him to hear, “Haven’t I seen that man somewhere?”
To save me the trouble of providing a fitting reply she made for the door, taking her purse from her slacks pocket. I crossed to Wolfe and asked him, “Have you met Sheriff Haight?”
“No,” he said.
“That’s him.” I pointed noticeably. “Do you want to?”
“No.”
I turned to Haight. “Good evening. Do you want to ask Mr Wolfe or me something? Or tell us something?”
“No,” he said.
Thinking that was enough noes for a while, I went and handed the man at the door two bucks and passed through. The musicians were taking a rest, but as I was winding through the mob across to where I knew Lily would be, they started up, something I couldn’t name, and Lily came to meet me, and we were off. Also on. We had moved together so many hours to so many beats that on a dance floor we were practically a four-legged animal.
We don’t usually talk much while we’re dancing, but in a minute she said, “He followed you in.”
“Who? Haight?”
“No, the other one.”
“I supposed he would. I didn’t want to please him by looking back.”
After another minute: “What does that ape think he’s doing, sitting there?”
“Hoping. Hoping for an excuse to bounce us out of his county.”
After another minute, during which we saw Diana hopping with a guy in a purple shirt and Levi’s, and Wade with a girl in a sweater and a mini: “You said he was going to be in Woody’s rooms.”
“So did he. Evidently he decided to watch the herd arrive and spot the murderer. He is capable of deciding absolutely anything.”
After two more minutes: “What is it about Sam Peacock? No, I take it back. I will not ask questions. It’s just that seeing him sitting there, if it goes on much longer he’ll decide I have to be obliterated, and damn it, he’s the only man on earth I could be afraid of. Do you want to tell me about Sam Peacock or not?”
“Not. It may get us a lead, but don’t hold your breath. As for Nero Wolfe, forget it. This will do him good. He even ate some of Carol’s mashed potatoes. You didn’t involve him and neither did I; he involved himself, and he’s fully aware of it. He’s aware of everything.”
“I haven’t seen Sam Peacock.”
“He’s always late. Last week he didn’t come until nearly eleven. I told you, remember, I heard him tell a girl that when he was a yearling they had to tie his mother up before she’d let him suck.”
When the band stopped for breath I took Lily to her favourite spot by an open window and went on a tour to see who was there, and to confer with myself. Deputy Sheriff Ed Welch was standing over by the band platform and I passed by with my elbow missing his by half an inch to show him how nonchalant I was. If Morley Haight was going to stay put on that chair in the Gallery, and he probably would when Wolfe went inside, I didn’t like the program. Seeing me take Sam Peacock in to Wolfe, Haight would of course sit tight and collar Sam when he came out, and Sam was the one and only person from whom Wolfe might pry something to bite on. Not just his trying to slide past the Thursday morning when Brodell had gone for a look at Berry Creek; there was also all day Tuesday and all day Wednesday, when Brodell had been with him and no one else. And if Wolfe got a hint from Sam and Sam knew it, Haight would worm it out of him. I did not like the prospect that if we got a glimmer Haight would get it too, and I knew Wolfe wouldn’t. As I moseyed past the door I took a look through at the Gallery. Haight was there, at Woody’s desk, with a paperback, and Wolfe wasn’t.
Moving around, and standing near a corner when the band was going, in the next half-hour I saw maybe 183 faces I had seen
before, and I had names for about half of them, including most of the people you have met-everybody at Farnham’s, and Pete Ingalls and Emmett Lake at the Bar JR. Pete was dancing with Lily, and she wiggled a finger at me as they went by. No Sam Peacock, but I saw a friend of his, the girl who had told him the week before that he looked awful. She had on the same cherry-coloured shirt, or one just like it. When the band stopped and she walked away from her partner, looking as if she hadn’t enjoyed it much, I went and headed her off and said, “I dance better than he does.”
“I know you do,” she said, “I’ve seen you. You’re Archie Goodwin.”
At close quarters she looked younger and prettier. Some do. “If you know my name,” I said, “I ought to know yours.”
“Peggy Truett. Thank you for telling me how good you dance. Now I know.”
“That was just coiling the rope. The next move is to show you. I was leading up to it.”
“I bet you were.” She brushed back a strand of wavy blond hair. “You’re shy, that’s your trouble, I know. I’m not. Sure, I’d like to accept your kind invitation, but I guess I won’t. I’ve seen you here a lot of times, last year and this year, and maybe you saw me, but you never headed in to me before, so why now? That’s easy. You want to ask me about Sam Peacock.”
“Do I? What about him?”
“You know damn well what about him. You and that fatty Nero Wolfe, last night you pumped him good just because he wrangled that dude and that was his job. If I was him I wouldn’t give you-”
Her eyes left me, went past me, for something in my rear, and then all of her left. As she brushed my arm going by I turned for a look and saw Sam Peacock arriving. He saw Peggy Truett coming and came to meet her, and I looked at my wrist and saw that in nine minutes it would be eleven o’clock. The band started up and I moved to the wall, over near the door, and stood noticing pairings on the floor with my eyes only-Lily and Woody, Bill Farnham and Mrs Amory, Pete Ingalls and Diana Kadany, Armand DuBois and a woman in a black dress, Wade Worthy and a girl from an upriver ranch. Ed Welch, the deputy, was sitting on the edge of the platform, a little higher than on a chair.
