Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 44

by Death of a Dude

  “If I wasn’t going to tell you,” Diana said, “I wouldn’t have mentioned it.” She forked a bite of meat to her mouth and started to chew. She often did that; she might get a part in a play with an eating scene, and mixing chewing and talking needed practice. An actor can practice anywhere any time with anybody, and most of them do. “It was this,” she said. “If that man hadn’t been murdered, Archie wouldn’t be here. He would have left three days ago. So the murderer did us a favor. You won’t have to vote on that. That’s an awful thought.”

  “We’ll thank him when we know who he is,” Lily said.

  Diana swallowed daintily and took a bite of potato. “It’s no joke, Lily. It was an awful thought, but it gave me an idea for a play. Someone could write a play about a woman who does awful things—you know, she lies, she steals, she cheats, she takes other women’s husbands, she might even murder somebody. But the play would show that every time she hurts someone it helps a lot of other people. She makes some people suffer awful agonies, but she gives ten times as many people some kind of benefit. She does lots more good than she does harm. I haven’t decided what the last scene would be, that would be up to whoever writes the play, but it could be a wonderful scene, utterly wonderful. Any actress would love it. I know I would.”

  The bite of potato was gone and another bite of meat was being chewed. She was really pretty good at it, but she had the advantage of a very attractive face. A girl with a good face has to be really messy to make you want to look somewhere else when she talks while she eats. Diana looked at Worthy and said, “You’re a writer, Wade. Why couldn’t you do it?”

  He shook his head. “Not that kind of writer. Suggest it to Albee or Tennessee Williams. As for the murderer doing us a favor, it wasn’t much of one. We’ve seen darned little of Archie this week.” He looked at me, the friendly grin. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine.” I swallowed food. “All I need now is a confession. Diana was there picking berries on the best and biggest bush, and he came and pushed her away and she shot him. Luckily—”

  “What with?” Diana demanded.

  “Don’t interrupt. Luckily Wade came along with a gun, out after gophers, and he shot him first but only in the shoulder, and you asked him to let you try and he handed you the gun.”

  Wade pointed his knife at me. “We’re not going to confess. You’ll have to prove it.”

  “Okay. Do you know about personal congenital radiation?”

  “No.”

  “That the personal congenital radiation of no two people is the same, like fingerprints?”

  “It sounds reasonable.”

  “It’s not only reasonable, it’s scientific. It’s a wonder any detective ever detected anything without modern science. I went to Blue Grouse Ridge today with a new Geiger counter, eight cents off the regular price, and it gave me Diana and you. You had both been there. All I need now—”

  “Certainly we were there,” Diana said with her mouth full. “You and Lily took us there! Three or four times!”

  “Prove it,” Lily said. “I don’t remember.”

  “Lily! You do! You must!”

  One of the difficulties about Diana was that you were never absolutely sure whether she was playing dumb or was dumb.

  By the time we got to sherbet and coffee the evening had been discussed and settled. Evenings could be pinochle, reading books or magazines or newspapers, television, conversation, or private concerns in our rooms, or sometimes, especially Saturdays, contacts with natives. For that evening Wade suggested pinochle, but I said it would have to be three-handed because I was going to Lame Horse. They considered going along and decided not to, and after doing my share of table-clearing I went out and started the car.

  Now I have a problem. If I report fully what I did the next four days and nights, from eight p.m. Saturday to eight p.m. Wednesday, you will meet dozens of people and be better acquainted with Monroe County, Montana, but you will not have gained an inch on the man or woman who shot Philip Brodell, because I didn’t; and you may get fed up, as I almost did. I’ll settle for one sample if you will, and the sample might as well be that Saturday evening.

  Since most of the Saturday-night crowd at Lame Horse came in cars and it was only twenty-four miles to Timberburg, you might suppose they would go on to the county seat, where there was a movie house with plush seats and a bowling alley and other chances to frolic, but no. Just the opposite; Saturday night quite a few people who lived in Timberburg, as many as a hundred or more, came to Lame Horse. The attraction was a big old ramshackle frame building next to Vawter’s General Store which had a sign twenty feet long at the edge of the roof, reading:

  WOODROW STEPANIAN HALL OF CULTURE

  That was the hall, usually called Woody’s. Woody, now in his sixties, had built it some thirty years ago with money left him by his father, who had peddled anything you care to name all over that part of the state even before it was a state. All of Woody’s young years had been spent in a traveling department store. At birth he had been named Theodore, for Roosevelt, but when he was ten years old his father had changed it to Woodrow, for Wilson. In 1942 Woody had considered changing it to Franklin, for another Roosevelt, but had decided there would be too many complications, including changing the sign.

  First on the Saturday-night program at the hall was a movie, which started at eight o’clock and which I didn’t really need, so after parking the car down the road I went to Vawter’s. Inside the high-ceilinged room a hundred feet long and nearly as wide, it was obvious why I wouldn’t have had to go to Timberburg except for mailing the letter and consulting Who’s Who. A complete inventory would take several pages, so I mention only a few items such as frying pans, ten-gallon hats, five-gallon coffee pots, fishing tackle, magazines and paperbacks, guns and ammunition, groceries of all kinds, ponchos, spurs and saddles, cigars and cigarettes and tobacco, nuts and candies, hunting knives and kitchen knives, cowboy boots and rubber waders, men’s wear and women’s wear, a tableload of Levi’s, picture postcards, ballpoint pens, three shelves of drugs …

  A dozen or so customers were scattered around, and Mort Vawter, his wife Mabel, and his son Johnny were busy with them. I hadn’t come to buy, or even to talk, but to listen, and after a look around I decided that the best prospect was a leather-skinned woman with stringy black hair who was inspecting a display of shoes on a counter. She was Henrietta, a halfbreed bootlegger who lived down the road, and she knew everybody. I moseyed over and said, “Hi, Henrietta. I bet you don’t remember me.”

  She moved her head a little sideways to give her black eyes a slant at me, as cautious people often do. “What you bet?”

  “Oh, a buck.”

  “Huh. Miss Rowan’s man. Mr. Archie Goodwin.” She put a hand out palm up. “One buck.”

  “Huh yourself. You may not mean what you could mean, so I’ll skip it.” I had my wallet out. “It’s a pleasant surprise seeing you here.” I handed her a bill. “I would have thought you’d be busy with customers Saturday evening.”

  She turned the bill over to see the other side. “Trick?” She grunted and spread her fingers, and the bill fluttered to the floor. “New trick.”

  “No trick.” I picked up the finif and offered it. “One buck of this is the bet. The rest is for your time answering a couple of questions I want to ask.”

  “I don’t like questions.”

  “Not about you. As you know, my friend Harvey Greve is in trouble.”

  She grunted. “Bad trouble.”

  “Very bad. You may also know I’m trying to help him.”

  “Everybody knows.”

  “Yeah. And everybody seems to think I can’t, because he killed that man. You see a lot of people and hear a lot of talk. Do they all think that?”

  She pointed at the bill in my hand. “I answer and you pay? Four dollars?”

  “I pay first. Take it and then answer.”

  She took it, looked at both sides again, poked it in a pocket in he
r skirt, and said, “I don’t go to the court.”

  “Of course not. This is just a friendly talk.”

  “Many people say Mr. Greve killed him. Not all. Some people say you killed him.”

  “How many?”

  “Maybe three, maybe four. You know Emmy?”

  I said yes. Emmy was Emmett Lake, who rode herd at the Bar JR and was known to be one of Henrietta’s best customers. “Don’t tell me he says I did it.”

  “No. He say a man at Mr. Farnham’s.”

  “I know he does, but he doesn’t say which one. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what you think.”

  “Me think? Huh.”

  I gave her a man-to-woman smile. “I bet you think plenty.”

  “What you bet?”

  “I couldn’t prove it. Look, Henrietta, as I said, you hear a lot of talk. He was here six weeks last year—the man who was killed. He told me he bought something from you.”

  “One time. With Mr. Farnham.”

  “Did he say anything about anybody?”

  “I forget.”

  “But you don’t forget what people have said about him this week, since he was killed. That’s my most important question. I don’t expect you to name anybody, only what anyone has said about him.” I got a sawbuck from my wallet and kept it visible. “It might help me help Mr. Greve. Tell me what you’ve heard about him.”

  Her black eyes lowered to fix on the bill and raised again. “No,” she said.

  And it stayed no, though I spent ten minutes trying to budge her. I returned the sawbuck to my wallet. It wouldn’t have done any good to double it or even make it a hundred; she wasn’t going to risk being asked questions in the court even if I swore on ten saddles that she wouldn’t have to. I left her and surveyed the field. Of the dozen or more people in view, I knew the names of all but three, but none of them was likely to spill any beans, and I went out and along to Woody’s.

  The hall was even bigger than Vawter’s store outside, but inside it was partitioned into three sections, with the entrance at the middle section, which had shelves and counters with displays of cultural material, some of it for sale. There were phonograph records, paperbacks, reproductions of paintings and drawings, busts of great men, facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence, and a slew of miscellaneous items like the Bible in Armenian, most of them one-of-a-kind. Very few people ever bought anything there; Woody had told Lily that he took in about twenty dollars a week. His income came from the other two sections, where you had to pay to get in—the one at the left to see a movie and the one at the right to dance and mix, both Saturdays only.

  When I entered, Woody was conversing with a quartet of dudes from some ranch upriver or downriver, three men and a woman, whom I had never seen before. I listened a while, looking at paperbacks, learning nothing. Woody claimed he never offered a book for sale unless he had read it, and I won’t call him a liar. His opinion of dudes in general was fully as low as that of most of his fellow Montanans, but he liked Lily so he accepted me, and he left the quartet to come and ask me if Miss Rowan was coming. I told him no, she was tired and going early to bed, and she had asked me to give him her regards.

  He wasn’t as short as Alma Greve, but he too had to tilt his head back to me. His eyes were as black as Henrietta’s, and his mop of hair was as white as the top of Chair Mountain. “I bow to her,” he said. “I kiss her hand with deep respect. She is a doll. May I ask, have you made some progress?”

  “No, Woody, I haven’t. Are you still with us?”

  “I am. Forever and a day. If Mr. Greve shot that man like a coward I am a bow-legged coyote. I have told you I had the pleasure of meeting him when he was two years old. I was sixteen. His mother bought four blankets from my father that day and two dozen handkerchiefs. You have made no progress?”

  “Not a smell. Have you?”

  He shook his head, slow, his lips pursed. “I must confess I haven’t. Of course during the week I don’t see many people. Tonight there will be much talk and I’ll keep my ears open, and with some I can ask questions. You will stay?”

  I said sure, that I had already asked questions of everybody who might have answers, but I would listen to the talk. A pair of dudes had entered and were approaching to speak with the famous Woody, and I went back to the paperbacks, picked one entitled The Greek Way, by Edith Hamilton, which I had heard mentioned by both Lily and Nero Wolfe, and went to a bench with it.

  At 9:19 a man in a pink shirt, working Levi’s, cowboy boots, and a yellow neck rag, arrived, opened the door at the right, and set up his equipment, supplied by Woody, just outside the door—a till and a box of door checks on a little table. The gun at his belt was for looks only; Woody always checked it to make sure it wasn’t loaded. At 9:24 the musicians came—having met at Vawter’s probably, at Henrietta’s possibly—dressed fully as properly as the doorman, with a violin, an accordion, and a sax. Local talent. The piano, which Lily said was as good as hers, was on the platform inside. At 9:28 the first patrons showed, and at 9:33 the door at the left opened and the movie audience poured out, most of them across to the other door; and the fun started. The next four hours was what brought people of all ages from Timberburg, and both natives and dudes from as far away as Flat Bank. When the rush at the door had let up a little I paid my two bucks and went in. The band was playing “Horsey, Keep Your Tail Up,” and fifty couples were already on the floor, twisting and hopping. One of them was Woody and Flora Eaton, a big-boned widow out of luck who did the laundry and housework at the Bar JR. Many a dudine had tried to snare Woody for that first dance, but he always picked a native.

  I said this is a sample, and I mustn’t drag it out. In those four hours at the hall I heard much and saw much, but left around one-thirty no wiser.

  I heard a girl in a cherry-colored shirt call across to Sam Peacock, one of the two wranglers at Farnham’s, who came late, “Get a haircut, Sam, you look awful,” and his reply, “I ain’t so bad now. You should have seen me when I was a yearling, they had to tie my mother up before she’d let me suck.”

  I saw Johnny Vawter and Woody bounce a couple of boiled dudes who were trying to take the accordion away from the musician. The hooch that had inspired them had been brought by them, which was customary. At the bar in a corner the only items available were fizz-water, ice, paper cups, soft stuff, and aspirin.

  I heard more beats and off-beats, and saw more steps and off-steps, than I had heard and seen at all the New York spots I was acquainted with.

  I heard a middle-aged woman with ample apples yell at a man about the same age, “Like hell they’re milk-fake!” and saw her slap him hard enough to bend him.

  I heard a dude in a dinner jacket tell a woman in a dress nearly to her ankles, “A sheet-snapper is not a prostitute. It’s a girl or a woman who makes beds.” I heard Gil Haight say to another kid, “Of course she’s not here. She’s got a baby to look after.” I saw about eight dozen people, all kinds and sizes, look the other way, or stop talking, or give me the fish-eye, when I came near.

  So back at the cabin, in bed under two blankets for the cold of the night, there was nothing for my mind to work on and it turned me loose for sleep.

  That’s the sample, but before skipping to Wednesday evening I must report an incident that occurred at the cabin late Tuesday afternoon. I had just got back from somewhere and was with Lily on what we called the morning terrace, the other one being the creek terrace, when a car came up the lane—a Dodge Coronet hardtop I had seen before—with two men in the front seat, and Lily said, “There they are. I was just going to tell you, Dawson phoned they wanted to see me. He didn’t say why.”

  The car was there, at the edge of the lodgepoles, and Luther Dawson and Thomas R. Jessup were getting out. Seeing those two, I was so impressed that I didn’t remember my manners and leave my chair until they were nearly to us. The defense counsel and the county attorney coming together to see the owner of the ranch Harvey Greve ran had to mean that somet
hing had busted wide open, and when I did get up I had to control my face to keep it from beaming. Their faces were not beaming as they exchanged greetings with us and took the chairs I moved up for them, but of course the county attorney’s wouldn’t be if something had happened that was messing up a murder case for him. Lily said their throats were probably dry and dusty after their drive and asked what they would like to drink, but they declined with thanks.

  “It may strike you as a little irregular, our coming together,” Dawson said, “but Mr. Jessup wanted to ask you something and we agreed that it would be more in order for me to do the asking, in his presence.”

  Lily nodded. “Of course. Law and order.”

  Dawson looked at Jessup. They were both Montana-born-and-bred, but one looked it and the other didn’t. Dawson, around sixty, in a striped blue-and-green shirt with rolled-up sleeves, no tie, and khaki pants, was big and brawny and leathery, while the county attorney, some twenty years younger, was slim and trim in a dark gray suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. Dawson looked at me, opened his mouth, shut it again, and looked at Lily. “Of course you’re not my client,” he said. “Mr. Greve is my client. But you paid my retainer and have said you will meet the costs of his defense. So I’ll just ask you, have you consulted—er, approached—anyone else about the case?”

  Lily’s eyes widened a little. “Of course I have.”

  “Who?”

  “Well … Archie Goodwin. Mrs. Harvey Greve. Melvin Fox. Woodrow Stepanian. Peter Ingalls. Emmett Lake. Mimi Deffand. Mort—”

  “Excuse me for interrupting. My question should have been more specific. Have you consulted anyone other than local people? Anyone in Helena?”

  If she had been any ordinary woman I would have horned in, but with Lily I didn’t think it was necessary. It wasn’t. “Really, Mr. Dawson,” she said, “how old are you? How many hostile witnesses would you say you have cross-examined?”