Rex Stout - 1939 - The Mountain Cat Murders Page 5

  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.

  Chapter 4

  Delia 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.

  Delia closed her eyes and read the note her mother had left—read it seeing it, though the paper itself was in a box at home in her closet. She read every word, her throat constricting. But her mother’s terror of the evil had been so great that she had made no attempt to attack it even in that farewell to her daughters; it had contained no mention, no reference at all, to the Reverend Rufus Toale. Nevertheless, Delia and Clara had known. Clara had admitted to Delia that it stared them in the face. And in spite of that, only two weeks ago, only a fortnight after their mother was buried, Clara had allowed Rufus Toale to enter their house and had talked with him! And again and again! And had put Delia off with evasions when she had expostulated.

  Delia shivered in the coolness the evening had brought.

  She opened her eyes. She heard the sound of footsteps at a distance on the path, but gave it only enough attention for a flitting assumption that it was the caretaker on his rounds. It was twilight, nearly dark, and she realized with a start that Clara might be worrying about her, and besides, she had something to do. She didn’t want to leave. If there was an answer anywhere, it was here. She had always before come to the cemetery in the morning, but now that she had been here in the dusk of evening, she would come again. It was more … it was better, with no sun shining, with night falling, with the air chill and silent gloom preparing to blanket the graves.…

  She became aware that the footsteps had approached quite close—and had stopped. As she started to turn her head a deep, musical voice sounded almost directly above her:

  “Good evening, Miss Brand.”

  She leaped to her feet and was facing the Reverend Rufus Toale.

  His ludicrous straw hat, which he wore winter and summer, was in his hand, strands of his dark hair, with no gray, straggled on his high broad forehead, and a faint compression and twisting of his lips, obviously habitual, might have been characterized, by an impious or hostile tongue, as an unctuous smirk.

  “Praise God,” he said.

  Delia began to tremble from head to foot.

  “I haven’t seen you here before,” he said, “since your mother was taken, though I know you have been coming. My services to the living, for His glory, take up my day and I can come only in the evening. You don’t let me see you, my child, though I have a message for you. I can help you, we can be helped together, by His grace and power and goodness and wisdom. You come, I fear, to this resting place of that sorely tried woman, your dear mother, only to sorrow in her defeat, but I come for strength.” He extended the hand that was not embarrassed by the hat. “I would like to lead you—”

  “Get out of here.” Delia thought she was screaming, though in fact her voice was low, a dull dead monotone. “You—you—get out of here …”

  Then she gave up. She couldn’t shoot him, because she had no gun. She couldn’t touch him—she couldn’t do anything. So suddenly she darted past him, to the path, leaving her hat there on the grass next to her mother’s grave, and ran. Her heroic resolve on a supreme retaliation to evil had descended to the level of that trite grotesquerie: a headlong terrified flight through a cemetery at the fall of night. She stumbled once but caught herself and arrived at the gate breathless.

  She sat in her car, trembling all over, for a while, until it occurred to her that he might come, and then she started the engine and got the car moving, headed for Cody.

  The driving helped to steady her. She liked to drive. Her father had taught her and she was good at it. The dashboard clock said 9:50 as she entered the residential section. She considered telephoning home, or going by way of Vulcan Street to stop at the house, but the route there would take her within two blocks of the Jackson address—and besides, when she saw or spoke to Clara she wanted to be able to announce an accomplished fact. So when she got to Blacktail Avenue she turned left and in another minute rolled to a stop at the curb in front of number 342.

  She unfastened three buttons of her dress, retrieved the note from where she had pinned it and buttoned up again. Then she switched off the lights, climbed out and started up the path toward the door of the house; but came to a stop as the rays of headlights swept across her and a car turned into the driveway, scrunching the gravel, and halting opposite her. She heard the car door opening and a voice called:

  “Hello, that you, Jean?”

  “No! It’s me, Delia Brand!”

  “Oh!” A dark blotch that was a wrap and a white spot that was a face approached across the lawn. “Surprise party?”

  “I came to see your husband.”

  “Then I’m afraid the surprise is on you. He’s not home. He’s down at the office.”

  Delia glanced at the house.

  “I know,” said Amy Jackson, born Sammis. “The lights are on. I always leave them on when I go out after dark. I’ve only been gone a few minutes, ran downtown to get something.”

  “Are you sure he’s at the office?” That was tactless, Delia knew as she said it, but it was out.

  “Yes, I—yes, that’s where he said he was going.”

  “Much obliged. I guess I’ll drive down there. I just want to see him about something.”

  She returned to the car, clutching the note in her hand, got in, and drove to Halley Street.

  There was as little space for parking in front of the old Sammis Building as there had been in the afternoon; even less, for Delia was forced to go nearly to the next corner. She walked back. The sidewalk there was well lit and well populated, for The Haven was one of the centers of the town’s strange night life. Salesgirls and garage employees could and did bet a dime on the even at the roulette wheel, but Mortimer Cullen of Chicago had once dropped eighty thousand dollars at faro in five hours.

  Delia had never been inside The
Haven. She gave its bright windows only a passing glance as she went on to the door admitting to the stairway. The stairs themselves were quite dim, but, mounting, she found that the upper hall, with an electric bulb glowing, was better lit than in the daytime. On the door which said Sammis & Jackson the glass panel looked dark, with no light behind it, but she tried it anyway, found it unlocked and pushed it open. With the note in her hand she felt armed with authority, so she flipped the light switch. The door leading to Jackson’s room was closed, and she went and knocked on it. Silence. She knocked again and called his name, but got no response, so she opened that door too. The room was dark, as the front one had been. She wasn’t familiar with that light switch, but soon found it and turned it on. Then, after one glance, she jerked her head up and stiffened, and stood not breathing, and neither Ty Dillon nor anyone could have accused her of mimicry of movie stars as she held the pose.

  A man was in the chair behind the desk, but not in any of the approved, or even disapproved, positions. It was as if he had bent far over to reach something on the floor, got hung on the arm, and whimsically stayed there.

  Delia’s nerves were already quivering, had been for some time, and her impulse, after the first shock into rigidity, was to turn and flee screaming down the stairs. Doubtless she would have done that had not the familiarity of an object on the desk demanded, and got, her attention as her eyes began their movement away from the man in the chair. It lay near the edge of the desk closest to her, and she stared at it in amazement.

  It was her handbag.

  She continued to stare, still rigid; then instinctively, without thinking, stepped forward to get it. She took it in her hand, saw that it was indeed and unbelievably hers, started to tuck it under her arm, and then rested it on the desk again and with fingers that trembled not at all opened it.