by Rex Stout
“Of course.” She was controlling a smile. “Archie has quoted you as saying once that a guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality. I know too much about you to expect you to be a jewel, but neither will you be an abomination. You could have just told Archie to come and tell me you were going to stay, instead of getting me in and asking me. You did it very nicely. I know how you feel about guests and hosts; I have dined at your house. Before you go to bed, tell me if you want anything.”
“I presumed to ask Mr Goodwin if there is an electric blanket.”
“Certainly.” She rose. “What else?”
“At the moment, nothing. Sit down-if you please. Mr Goodwin is going to tell me what he has done and we’re going to discuss what’s to be done now. I’ll ask questions, and you may know the answers to some of them better than he does. Will you remain?”
“Yes. I would like to.”
“Very well. My first question deals with you. It must, if I am to be a guest in your house. How and where did you spend the afternoon of Thursday, July twenty-fifth?”
I don’t want to give the impression that I am trying to sell the idea that Lily Rowan, in all respects and circumstances and 365 days in the year, is a perfect female biped. Anyone who tried to sell me that idea would have an argument. But there aren’t many women who wouldn’t have wasted time and words, one way or another, in reacting to that question, and she didn’t react at all, she merely answered it.
“Most of it fishing,” she said, “in the Fishtail River. In midsummer trout are scarce in the creek and to fill a creel you have to go to the river. Around one o’clock that day Archie and I were sitting at the edge of Cutthroat Pool eating a picnic lunch. We had left our horses at the end of the trail.” She turned to me. “How far were we from Blue Grouse Ridge?”
“Oh, ten or twelve miles.”
Back to Wolfe. “Blue Grouse Ridge is where Philip Brodell was killed. After lunch we caught fish and took a dip in the river, which a polar bear would love, and watched beavers repairing a dam in a creek, and Archie threw a rock at a bear-black, not polar-who jumped into a pool to swim across when he had a cutthroat on. It was nearly dark when we got home, and Diana-she’s a guest-said that Bill Farnham had phoned to ask if Philip Brodell was here.”
“What’s a cutthroat?”
“A trout with a red mark under the jaw. If I had a cap, that would be a feather in it, using a word you didn’t know.”
“There are thousands of words I don’t know.” He turned to me. “I concede that you may reasonably object that that was unnecessary. If you had not conclusively eliminated Miss Rowan, you would not have remained as her guest. I’ve had a long hard day and I’m tired, and my wits are slow. I haven’t even asked you if you shot that man. Did you?”
“No. I was wondering why you didn’t ask.”
“I’m tired. But go ahead. If I find I can’t keep up with you I’ll say so. Report.”
“I’ll have to know what for,” I said. “You said you don’t know how long you’ll stay. If you intend just to check our conclusion on Harvey and wish us luck, there’s no point in-”
“How can I check your conclusion? I can only accept it or reject it. Very well, I accept it. The length of my stay depends on how long it will take us to establish his innocence.”
” ‘Us’?”
“Yes.”
I raised a brow. “I don’t know. You mean well and I deeply appreciate it, but there are a couple of snags. One, we have never worked together like this. We’re equals, fellow guests of Miss Rowan. You wouldn’t be paying me to run errands and follow instructions and bring anybody you wanted to see, and I would be free to balk if I thought-”
“Nonsense. I’m reasonable and so are you.”
“Not always, especially you. I have known you to assume-but there’s no use in going into that now. It might work. We can give it a try. Second, you’d be in the same fix as me, only worse. Nobody would tell you anything. I’ve been here before, as you know, but men who have pitched horseshoes and played pinochle and chased coyotes with me, and women who have danced with me, clam up when I want to discuss murder. I’ve had ten days of that, and you’re not only a dude, you’re a complete stranger and a freak that wears a vest. Even if you asked me to go and bring A or B or C, and I brought him, you would know as much when he left as when he came. He might tell you how old he is. I doubt if-”
“Archie. If your conclusion about Mr Greve is sound, and I have accepted it, someone knows something that will demonstrate it. Will my presence make it harder for you?”
“No.”
“Very well. Miss Rowan has said I may occupy this room. I would appreciate a full report.”
“It would take all night. We’d better go to bed and-”
“I can’t go to bed until my luggage comes.”
“Okay. More beer?”
He said no. I shifted in my chair and crossed my legs. “This will be the longest row of goose eggs I have ever reported. I have spent ten days on it, and as I said, I haven’t got a scrap of evidence pointing to anyone. There are plenty of possibles. Two of them are your fellow guests, very handy for grilling: Miss Diana Kadany, a New York actress so far off Broadway but hoping to make it on, and Mr Wade Worthy, a writer, working on the outline of a book he’s going to produce about Miss Rowan’s father. They both qualify on means. In a cupboard in the storeroom, which is down the hall, there’s a gun that would have done fine-a Mawdsley Special double-decker. Either of them would have trouble hitting a barn with it, let alone a barn door, as they proved a couple of weeks ago when Diana and I took on Worthy and Miss Rowan for a target tournament, but that fits in, since X was a lousy shot. So there’s two possibles, right here. Morley Haight, the sheriff, didn’t check the gun, with Miss Rowan’s permission, until Friday afternoon. It was clean, but there had been plenty of time to see to that.”
“His motive? Or hers?”
“I’ll come to it. On opportunity they also qualify. Mimi Deffand, who will cook your breakfast unless you would rather do it yourself had the day off, with Miss Rowan and me picnicking at the river, and she spent it in Timberburg. I haven’t pumped my fellow guests, but it appears from conversation that Diana picnicked too, up the creek at what we call the second pool, and got back around six o’clock, so Worthy was here alone. Beautiful. No alibi for either of them, and they would be hot if there was the slightest smell of motive. Neither of them had ever seen Brodell, they say. I saw him a few times last year-he and Farnham came for supper once, and we went there-and he liked shows and had been to New York, I don’t know how often. I thought of writing Saul to ask him to see if he could dig up a contact between Brodell and either of them, but you know what a job that is-at five Cs a week, which is what it would cost Miss Rowan.”
“That wouldn’t break me,” Lily said, “but I simply can’t believe they were lying when they said they had never seen him or heard of him. That was the day after he came, when I told them the father of Alma’s baby was back.”
“I missed a chance,” I said, “of seeing them with him, but I didn’t know he would be dead in about twenty hours. Farnham invited Miss Rowan and her guests to supper Wednesday, and she and Diana went, but Worthy and I didn’t. I have no ironbound rule against eating a meal with a man who has seduced a girl, but Brodell wasn’t on my list of pets anyhow, so I skipped it and won eighty cents at gin rummy with Worthy, who was off his feed and wanted to go to bed early.”
I flipped a hand. “They’re good samples of the possibles. At the Farnham place there are a cook and houseworker, two wranglers, four dudes, and Farnham himself. At the Bar JR there are Flora Eaton, who does laundry and house chores, Mel Fox, in charge now with Harvey gone, and two cowboys. Carol and Alma, the wife and daughter, are crossed off-not just their mutual alibi, I’ll tell you why when we’re on details. That’s fifteen possibles who were within walking distance, and add the adult population of Monroe County. Anyone could have driven here, and about two miles beyond
where you turned off on the lane to this cabin he could have left the car and climbed the ridge. Farnham says that last year Brodell was in Timberburg three or four times, and I spent three days there digging up contacts.”
“He took a box of huckleberries to the girl who sells tickets at the movie theater,” Lily said.
Wolfe grunted. “Was it a mania? Did he come here from St. Louis only to pick huckleberries?”
I said no, he also rode horses and fished. “Much of my three days in Timberburg was spent on Gilbert Haight-on people who know him. Besides the Greves, he’s the only one with any visible known motive. His alibi could be a phony, but to crack it you’d have to prove that at least three people are liars, and you couldn’t expect any help from the county men, since his father is the sheriff. One of the aspects of the situation is Sheriff Haight’s personal slants on it. It suits him fine to have Harvey on the hook for murder, because Harvey was pretty active against him when he ran for sheriff. The county attorney, Thomas R. Jessup, is not so keen on it because Harvey helped some to get him elected, but he can’t stall even if he wants to because he’s stuck with the evidence Haight has collected. Haight would love it if Jessup got a black eye, and vice versa, and it would be nice to find a way to take advantage of that, but I haven’t come up with one. I can’t even get to Jessup, probably because he thinks the case against Harvey is so strong that he has to go along.”
Wolfe nodded. “The Attorney General told me that the county attorney is a man of ability and integrity and good judgment.”
“Which may be true, in spite of something he did yesterday. He came here yesterday afternoon with the defence counsel, the lawyer Miss Rowan has hired, to ask her some questions. He wanted to know-they wanted to know-if Miss Rowan had-”
I stopped because I heard a car out front. Lily rose, but I said I would go, and when I did she came along, down the hall and on out to the terrace. It was the taxi, and the hackie had opened the rear door and was lifting out a big tan leather suitcase which hadn’t been out of the basement storeroom in the brownstone on West 35th Street for six years. The new guest’s luggage had come.
Chapter 5
At a quarter past three the next afternoon. Thursday, Nero Wolfe and I were sitting on rocks, facing each other. We had been there more than three hours. The top of his rock, about chair-height from the ground, was level and flat and fairly smooth, and had plenty of room for his rump. Mine was more rugged, level enough but far from smooth, but I had eased it by standing from time to time. To Wolfe’s right there was a tangle of brush, to his rear and left there were trees, mostly jack pine, and to his front, at a distance of some ten yards, Berry Creek was skimming and skittering over its rocky bottom toward the cabin, which was about half a mile away.
The night before, after leaving him in his room, Lily and I had agreed that he shouldn’t be pampered. He was in rough country and would have to rough it. If he wanted any of the frills to which he was accustomed, such as breakfast on a tray in his room, he would load it in the kitchen and carry it in himself. He would make his bed or not make it, as he chose, as we all did. I had gone back to his room, found him already under the electric blanket, and told him the household routine, and he had grunted and turned over.
The breakfast hour was nine o’clock, and usually we all made it unless there was something special on the program-except Diana, who often slept late. That morning she was right on time, probably because there was a new man to practice on. Of course Mimi knew Wolfe’s reputation on food, and I gave her a grin when I saw her putting paprika on the scrambled eggs, and again when I saw that she had nearly doubled the amount of bacon and bread slices for toast. Also instead of three kinds of jam on the table there were six. As Wade Worthy sat he said, “A reputation like yours has advantages, Mr Wolfe. Such abundance!”
“Don’t mind him,” Diana said. She patted Wolfe’s sleeve with two fingertips. “He’s just jealous. I would love to butter a toast for you.”
Wolfe declined the offer but didn’t scowl at her. A guest is a jewel. Mimi brought another platter of eggs, and they had paprika too.
After breakfast Wolfe and I had gone to his room and I helped him unpack. I admit that smacked of pampering, but I was curious. And as I had suspected when I had helped the hackie with the luggage, he had prepared for an extended stay when he left home; there was another suit-the brown worsted with little green specks-another pair of shoes, five shirts, ten pairs of socks, and so forth, including four books, one of which he may have brought along for possible reference. It was Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State. By Peter Farb. He may have supposed that a Blackfoot or Chippewa might be a suspect and he wanted to know how, their minds work.
When everything was unpacked and in place in drawers and the closet, I had made a suggestion. “If it’s to be a full report, it will take hours, and you’re used to a larger room. Mine is twice the size of this, or there’s the big room, or the terrace. You would probably-”
“No,” he said.
“No? No report?”
“Not here. Last evening I was constantly aware that we might be overheard, outside through the window or inside through the door or wall. Our discussions of problems have always been in a soundproofed room, secure, no unwanted interruptions. Whereas here-there are three women on the premises, and one of them is a congenital pest. Confound it, can’t we go somewhere?”
“If you mean somewhere under a roof, no. Outdoors, almost anywhere. I know dozens of nice spots for a picnic. The storeroom shelves aren’t as full as they were a month ago, but there’s sturgeon, ham, dried beef, four kinds of cheese-we can take our pick. There’s half a roast turkey in the kitchen refrigerator. The temperature of the creek is perfect for beer.”
“How far?”
“Anywhere from a hundred yards to a hundred miles. If we take horses���”
He glared at me and asked where the storeroom was.
It was nearly eleven o’clock when we hit the trail because he spent a good twenty minutes looking over the storeroom shelves and cupboards, and anyway I had to go and tell Lily and change my shoes and pack the knapsack with the grub. When we left, by the morning terrace, Diana, there in a chair, looked up at Wolfe and put on a pout and said she would have loved to come along, and he didn’t actually growl at her.
So at a quarter past three there we were, on the rocks, with the lunch remains, including three empty beer cans, back in the knapsack, and the report delivered and questions answered. Of course the report had not been full, if “full” means nothing left out, but he had the picture, including names and connections and guesses that had fizzled-a thousand details that I haven’t put in this report. The trunks of three saplings were rubbing against the edge of his rock, and he had tried twenty times to use them for a back rest, but it made his feet leave the ground and dangle, so it was no go. Now he tried it again, said, “Grrrrh,” gave up, slid forward on the rock, stood up, and started to speak but didn’t because something behind me caught his eye. He raised an arm to aim a finger and asked, “What’s that?”
I twisted around. A big gray bird had landed on a branch only twenty feet away and only six feet up. “Fool hen,” I said. “A kind of grouse that thinks everybody goes by its favourite saying, Peace on earth, good will to grouse. If I went slow and smooth, peaceful, I could walk over and pick it off.”
“Are they palatable?”
“Sure. Very tasty.”
“Then why are there any left?”
“I’ve asked about that, and apparently the feeling is that if a wild critter hasn’t got sense enough to act wild, to hell with it. So they call it fool hen. But you don’t see many of them.”
He moved, and with his hand on a tree for balance shook his right leg and then his left, to get his pants legs down. “I’m going to try something,” he said. “A telephone call. You wrote that Miss Rowan’s line might be tapped. If so, by whom?
The sheriff, or the county attorney?”
“The sheriff.”
“Then I can’t use it for this call. Is there one I can use with assurance?”
I nodded. “At Lame Horse. A New York call? Saul?”
“No. Mr Veale.”
“I haven’t mentioned anyone named Veale.”
“I have-not by name, by title. The Attorney General in Helena. I have his number. He knows I’m here. Mr McFarland telephoned him again yesterday, at my request, to tell him I was coming, and I went to see him when I got to Helena. I need to ask him something.”
I was up, getting the knapsack strapped on. I said the car would probably be available, but if not I could borrow one at the ranch, and we moved. Since we were equals I could have demanded to know what he wanted to ask the Attorney General, but it didn’t matter because nothing he asked anybody could have made the situation any worse.
Going back was tougher for him than coming had been, because it was downhill and there were a couple of places where anyone might do a tumble, but he made it without a scratch. The car was there, and I went in the cabin, got rid of the knapsack, went to Wolfe’s room to get a phone number from a slip of paper in a drawer, found Lily on the creek terrace, told her we had an errand in Lame Horse, and asked if the car was free. She said yes and asked if we would be back in time for supper, and I said yes, we were just going to make a phone call which I would tell her about later. Outside, Wolfe had taken the car for granted and got in, which was a little cheeky for a guest, and he was in the front, which was unusual. In his Heron sedan, which I drive, he always sits in the back, where there is a strap for him to grab when the car decides to try climbing a kerb or jostling some other car it doesn’t like. I got in behind the wheel and we rolled. As we turned onto the road at the end of the lane a wild animal scooted out from a tuft and bounded hell-bent for the brush, and he asked, “Native hare?”
“That depends,” I said, “on whether a jackrabbit is a hare. I’ve never looked it up, but I will. They are not palatable.” I circled around a rock patch. “The man we’re going to ask to let us use his phone is Woodrow Stepanian. As I reported, he’s one of the few people who thinks Harvey is clean.”