Rex Stout - 1939 - The Mountain Cat Murders Page 7

  “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?”

  It was the phone ringing in the front room. Clara nodded and said, “Yes, please.”

  While he was gone she sat twisting her fingers in and out, gazing at the egg on the table. She knew she should have been thinking, preparing an intelligent decision for the problem he had put, but she couldn’t manage her brain. It felt tired and battered. There was that egg. Less than twenty-four hours ago she and Delia had been there eating eggs together, and while they hadn’t been precisely gay, still they had been together and healthy and free.…

  Dillon returned through the swinging door and she looked up at his face. There was strained urgency in his eyes.

  He said, “When I was down at the jail trying to see Delia, the sheriff said he wanted to talk with me and told me to wait there. I was sure he wanted to ask me about that paper and whether Delia had asked me the question on it. I sneaked out and came here. He’s been phoning around and that was him, and he’s sore. I told him I’d be there in five minutes and I’ve got to go. Can I tell him I’m Delia’s counsel?”

  Clara untwisted her fingers and clenched them into fists. “Do I have to decide?”

  “You’re her sister.”

  “Would it mean—would I have to tell Mr. Sammis she is changing lawyers?”

  “Yes. Or if you don’t want to offend him, you might persuade him to tell Anson to take me on as associate. Which of course Anson would hate to do.”

  Clara sat with her fists clenched, slowly shaking her head, trying to think about it.

  Dillon waited. Finally he said, “All right. Come on down with me. If you can’t decide on the way, maybe you can see Delia and put it up to her the way I’ve explained it. You trust me, don’t you, Clara?”

  “The way you talk,” she said miserably, “I can’t trust anybody.” She moved. “Come on. I’ll go.”

  Chapter 6

  At the time that Evelina Sammis was taking off her shoes in the Brand kitchen, her husband was seated at his mahogany desk in his private office on the top floor of the new Sammis Building at 214 Mountain Street, obviously in bad humor, though not displaying the sidewise set of the jaw which foretold the imminent approach of one of his famous fits of temper. Two other men were with him. The one in the armchair, above middle age, who hadn’t shaved that morning, with shrewd cold eyes and a thin-lipped mouth, was Harvey Anson, generally regarded as the ablest lawyer in the state. The other was Frank Phelan, the Cody Chief of Police. He sat with his ankles crossed, displaying bright green socks, looking as hot and harassed as a dog chasing a dragonfly.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he muttered protestingly.

  “I would,” Lem Sammis declared with irate conviction. “I made Bill Tuttle sheriff of this county, and I made Ed Baker county attorney, and now they start playing with that damn bronco that thinks he can cut my cinch. They figure I’m seventy years old and about ready to turn up my toes, and when that happens that squarehead will take it over and they want to be already in his corral. But he figures it wrong himself. The way to do it is to start throwing the bridle while I’m still alive. Believe me. I’ve still got a little say-so in this state and this county and this town. Have I, Frank, or haven’t I?”

  “Sure you have.” The chief of police scratched his elbow. “You’re the boss and with me that goes one hundred percent. But this isn’t just a matter of say-so. It’s murder. You can’t expect Ed or Bill either to turn that girl loose when she was caught flat-footed like that. There’d be more whizzing around their heads than they could ever duck.”

  “The girl’s innocent. Dellie Brand never did it.”

  “Oh, my God, Lem. Have a heart.”

  “Did she do it, Harvey?”

  Anson smiled thinly and said, “I’m her attorney.”

  “And you say she’ll have to stand trial?”

  “She will if Ed Baker indicts her and it looks like he’s going to.”

  Sammis’s jaw started a slow sidewise movement. The chief of police saw it and put in hastily, “Now for God’s sake, Lem, take it easy. You know I’m for you like I’m for three meals a day. Maybe you’re right about Ed and Bill playing a little mumblety-peg with the squarehead, but whether they are or not, they couldn’t act any different in this case and stay in Wyoming. Look here.”

  Frank Phelan drew his feet in, leaned forward with his elbows resting on his thighs, and put the tip of his right index finger on the little one of his other hand. “One. She was found there by Squint Hurley with the gun in her hand, still warm, and it was her gun and she was acting dazed but with no fight in her, the way a girl would be after shooting a man. Two. Her handbag was
on the desk, not under her arm, and why would she have put it down if she had just entered the room? Three. Since you had given her your word that her sister wouldn’t be fired, why did she have to go there in such a hurry at night to give Jackson that note? Four. There was a paper in her handbag with a question in her handwriting, addressed to a lawyer, asking how to escape the penalty for committing murder. Five. She was sore at Jackson and had had a scrap with him in the afternoon.”

  He shifted hands. “Six. She bought a box of cartridges at MacGregor’s yesterday morning and told the clerk that she was going to shoot a man. Maybe you haven’t heard about that. That’s what she did. The clerk, a kid named Marvin Hopple, phoned us on his lunch hour yesterday and told us about it, but the boys just laughed it off and didn’t even bother to report it to me. I’ve talked to Hopple, and that’s what she did. Now I admit here’s a funny thing. She denies she had any intention of shooting Jackson or any reason to shoot him. She admits she wrote that question on the paper and she told Hopple she was going to shoot a man, but she won’t say who it was she had it in for. She only denies it was Jackson. Well, if it was Jackson, and she announced it in advance and didn’t intend to conceal it, but was going to plead justification, why did she change her mind and take the line she didn’t do it? I admit that’s funny. Maybe she just lost her nerve.… Anyway, seven. We don’t have—”

  “Excuse me.” It was Harvey Anson’s tight deceptively mild voice, parsimonious of breath. “She doesn’t admit she wrote that question on the paper or that she had any intention of shooting anyone.”

  “She did before you got hold of her and sealed her up.”

  “So you say.”

  “Certainly so I say.” Phelan looked more harassed than ever. “Hell, I’m not on the witness stand, am I? I’m the chief of police, and here I sit spilling my guts to the defense attorney, don’t I? Is this a friendly talk or what is it?”

  The lawyer nodded faintly and repeated in the same voice. “Excuse me.”

  “All right.” Phelan still held his fingers on the count. “Seven. We don’t have to assume that Jackson’s firing her sister was her motive, which I admit sounds weak, especially since her sister wasn’t being fired after all. Everybody in this town knows Jackson’s reputation, whether we like it or not. Investigation will show whether Delia Brand was one of the females—”

  “You can keep that in your throat!” Lem Sammis’s jaw finished the movement this time. “None of that from you or anybody else! And not only about Dellie Brand! Get this, Frank, and by God, keep it: whether it’s connected with Dellie Brand or no matter who, there’ll be no investigation of my son-in-law’s dealings with women and no court testimony, and no publicity! My daughter married that polecat and she’s had enough trouble from it!”

  The chief of police lifted his broad shoulders and dropped them. “If you can stop Bill and Ed and the whole shebang. There was that piece in the Times-Star already this morning—”

  “And the fellow that wrote it is already out on his neck!”

  A shade of awe appeared in Phelan’s eyes. “You made ’em tie a can to Art Gleason?”

  “I did!”

  “Okay. You win that round, Lem.”

  “And you sitting there counting your fingers! Take what you say about the handbag! She didn’t have the handbag! It had been stolen from her and it had the gun in it!”

  “Who says so?”

  “She does, damn it!”

  “Now, Lem, be reasonable.” Phelan upturned a pleading palm. “We’re not holding court, we’re just having a talk. What would you expect her to say? She had to say something or nothing, didn’t she? Of course it would have been better for her if she had made it nothing, even before Anson got there. That story about the bag being snitched from her car simply stinks and you know darned well it does. Picture how it will sound to a jury if she gets on the stand and tells it, without any corroboration, and she’ll have to tell it because no one else can, and if she’s put on the stand picture how she’s going to answer—”

  “She won’t get on the stand! She won’t go to court! I say she won’t!”

  “All right, Lem.” Phelan slowly shook his head. “I’ve seen you do everything to this town except hang it on the line to dry, and I’ve wore out three hats taking them off to you, but if you keep that Brand girl out of a courtroom I’ll just go bareheaded!”

  Bill Tuttle, Sheriff of Park County, sat in his office in the courthouse, which was on the basement floor, at the near end of the corridor leading to the warden’s office and the jail at the rear. In appearance he was not a frontier-style western sheriff, but neither was he streamlined. His visible apparel, from across the desk, consisted of a pink shirt, a purple tie and a black alpaca coat; and the most striking fact about his face was that someone had at some time or other hurled a boulder at his nose and hit it square. Hardly less would have accounted for its being so grotesque a slab.

  He was wishing he was somewhere else. There would be no profit and no glory from the Dan Jackson murder case; quite the contrary. The Brand girl had been caught flat-footed and there was nothing to it; but it was dynamite. He knew Art Gleason had been fired by the owners of the Times-Star and he knew why. Art Gleason booted into the alley! When Tuttle had made a long distance call, around dawn, to Senator Carlson (called, by some, the squarehead) in Washington, he knew what Carlson meant when he said that all good citizens would demand that justice be done without fear or favor; he meant that this might possibly be the long-awaited opportunity to put old Lem Sammis on the ropes; and though Carlson was unquestionably the coming man, it was too early to say that Sammis was even going, let alone gone.

  In the meantime, in conjunction with the county attorney and the chief of police, he was proceeding with his duty, the collection of evidence, already overwhelming. He didn’t know that at that moment the chief of police was in friendly conference with Lem Sammis and the defense attorney, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if he had.

  The phone buzzed and he picked up the instrument and asked it testily, “Well?”

  “Dr. Rufus Toale again. Wants to speak to you.”

  “Put him on.”

  He made a face at a corner of the desk, which with his nose was scarcely necessary, and in a moment said with great amiability, “Yes, Dr. Toale? This is Sheriff Tuttle.”

  “God bless you and keep you, Brother Tuttle. I am anxious about Delia—Miss Brand. Is she still asleep?”

  “Yes, she is. She was ten minutes ago.”

  “Praise God. The precious child. The precious soul. You won’t forget to let me know when she awakens?”

  “I’ll notify you at once, Dr. Toale.”

  “God bless you. And tell her, please, that I am coming to see her. As I warned you, she will say no, but we must trust to His grace and goodness and I must see her.”

  “I understand. I’ll tell her. Er—Mrs. Welch will tell her.”

  “That fine woman! She’s a fine woman, Brother Tuttle!”

  “She sure is. Thank you for calling.” The sheriff hung up and shoved the phone from him as if it with its own tongue had Brother Tuttled him. Not that he was irreligious, but he was then feeling that no man was his brother. After glaring at the phone a little he pulled it back and spoke into it. “Is that reporter out there, the one that flew from San Francisco? Send him in here.”

  That interview lasted half an hour, partly because it was interrupted four or five times by phone calls. The door was closing behind the reporter when the phone rang again to say that Tyler Dillon was outside, accompanied by Clara Brand. They were ushered in and they both took chairs.

  Tuttle glanced at Clara’s strained face, at her hands twisted in her lap. “Is there something I can do for you, Miss Brand? I told Mr. Sammis I wouldn’t need you any more, at least for the present. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “She’s with me,” Dillon put in.

  “I don’t need her with you. I’d like to see you alone. What’s the idea, anyway?
Didn’t you say you’d wait outside till I could see you?”

  “I got tired waiting. I had an appointment with Miss Brand and I wanted to keep it. For a consultation in the interest of my client.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “Her sister, Delia Brand.”

  “Your client?”

  “Yes. She was my client even before this ridiculous charge was brought against her. On another matter, of course.”

  “She was?”

  “Yes. She called at my office yesterday morning to consult me.”

  “She did? You admit that?”

  “Admit it? I state it as a fact.”

  “Was it on that occasion that she asked you a certain question which she had written down on a piece of paper?”

  “Now, Sheriff. Really! Surely you know that you can’t question counsel about interviews with his client.”

  “No?”

  “Certainly not. That’s elementary.”

  Tuttle frowned. “I can’t ask you about a piece of paper with your name on it and a question about how to do a murder?”

  “Not if it has any connection, or is supposed to have any connection, with my client.”

  “You refuse to answer?”

  “Under the circumstances, of course.”

  The sheriff’s frown deepened. He stood up abruptly, said, “Wait here a minute,” and left the room.

  There was a silence. They looked at each other and Clara said, “This may be a terrible mistake. I should have talked to Mr. Sammis first. I … I’m scared.”

  “Buck up, Clara.” He tried to smile encouragingly. “I haven’t involved you yet, anyhow. I’ll push ahead as far as I can without you, but you stick. Huh?”

  She nodded wretchedly.

  Ten minutes passed before the sheriff returned, and when he came he was accompanied by a plump competent-looking man in a natty tropical worsted suit with a cornflower in the lapel. He exchanged greetings with Dillon and crossed to shake hands with Clara, replying to a question from Tuttle:

  “Sure I know Miss Brand, we’re old Cody folks. I knew her when she wore a braid down her back, before I ever thought I’d be county attorney. I hope you realize, Clara …” He stopped, gave that up, and turned to the young lawyer. “What’s this the sheriff tells me, Dillon? About Delia Brand being your client?”