Death of a Dude nwo-44

by Rex Stout

  “The Hall of Culture. You told me three years ago that he tried to get you to read Bacon’s essays.”

  “I see you brought your memory along. It may come in handy.” I slowed the car to ease down the bank of a gully and climb back up. “He will expect you to shake hands. Everybody you meet out here will, and you’ve got enough built-in points against you without adding another one.”

  “I resent any formality requiring bodily contact.”

  “Yeah, I know. But what’s one more hardship after all you’ve gone through since yesterday morning?”

  He compressed his lips and turned his head to watch gophers diving into holes.

  At four in the afternoon on a weekday, in one respect Lame Horse is a big improvement on New York-the parking problem. Except Saturday nights, there isn’t any. When we got out, right at the entrance of the Hall of Culture, Wolfe stood there a minute, swiveling his head for a survey of the surroundings before preceding me inside. We crossed to a table by the wall where a four-sided game of Scrabble was in progress, though only one man was there-Woody-with the names of the four players written on cards by the racks: William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Woodrow Stepanian. I had seen that performance before, with different players, except Woody of course. He rose as we approached, and I pronounced names, and Wolfe took the offered hand like a gentleman. I concede that when he does shake he does it right.

  “It is an honour,” Woody said. “I bow to you. Do you play Scrabble?”

  Wolfe shook his head. “I don’t play games. I like using words, not playing with them.”

  “We came to ask a favour,” I said. “We have to make a private phone call and it could be that the sheriff has a tap on Miss Rowan’s line. She sends her regards. May we use your phone?”

  He said yes, certainly, looked down at the Scrabble game, muttered to himself, “Milton’s turn,” and went to the screen door and on out. Wolfe crossed to the desk in the corner where the phone was, and sat on a chair that was fine for Woody but not for him, and I told him to dial the operator and give her the number. He made a face, as always when he had to use the phone, and lifted the receiver.

  Since there was no extension for me I can report only one end of the talk. After he told somebody his name and asked for Mr Veale, and a two-minute wait: “Yes, speaking��� No, I’m not in Timberburg, I’m staying at the cabin of Mr Greve’s employer, the woman who owns the ranch��� Yes, Miss Lily Rowan. I have decided that I should communicate with Mr Jessup forthwith, and I need to know if you reached him��� Yes, I know, I understand the need for discretion��� No, he hasn’t, but he doesn’t know where I am��� Yes indeed, and I am obliged to you, and Mr McFarland will be too.”

  He hung up and turned to me and said, “Get Mr Jessup,” frowned, and added, “if you please.” Being my equal was an awful bother.

  Having rung the office of the county attorney in Timberburg four times to try to get an appointment, I didn’t have to look up the number. Standing at the end of the desk, I reached for the phone and dialed and told the female who answered that Nero Wolfe wanted to speak with Mr Jessup, and in a minute his voice came.

  “Mr Wolfe?”

  “Archie Goodwin. Here’s Mr Wolfe.”

  Again I can give only one end: “Mr Jessup? Nero Wolfe. I believe Mr Veale has spoken to you of me��� Yes, so he told me. I wish to talk with you, probably at some length, and not, I think, on the telephone��� Yes��� Certainly��� I would much prefer today��� Yes, I understand that��� No, I’m at a telephone in Lame Horse, in the office of Mr Woodrow Stepanian��� No. I don’t. You had better speak with Mr Goodwin.”

  He held it out and I took it. “Archie Goodwin.”

  “Do you know where Whedon’s Graveyard is?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll leave in about ten minutes-perhaps twenty-and meet you there. Will anyone be with you besides Mr Wolfe?”

  I said no, and he said all right and hung up. I told Wolfe, “We’re to meet him at Whedon’s Graveyard, which is a little farther from Timberburg than from here. About ten miles.”

  “A cemetery?”

  “No. A long time ago a man named Whedon got the idea that he could grow wheat there and he tried it, and the story is that he starved to death, but I doubt that. This begins to look interesting. Jessup doesn’t want you to come to his office because the sheriffs office is also in the courthouse.” I looked at my watch: 4:55. “I’ll ring Miss Rowan and tell her we’ll be late for supper.”

  While I was doing that, and getting the charges from the operator, he took a look at a few items of cultural material. When we went out I expected to see Woody there, but he wasn’t. He was with a little group in front of Vawter’s, watching a race up the road a little-or rather, a chase-coming this way. A scrawny little guy in Levi’s, no shirt, was loping down the middle of the road, and after him, some ten yards back, was a fat red-faced woman with a long leather strap. As he neared Vawter’s the man yelled at the group, “Rope her! Goddammit, rope her!” He yelled it again when he saw Wolfe and me. When he was about even with us he swerved to the right, stumbled and nearly fell, and headed for a path which curved around the side of a house, with the woman nearly at his tail. She almost had him as they disappeared back of the house.

  Wolfe looked at me with his brows up.

  “Local routine,” I said. “About once a month. Mr and Mrs Nev Barnes. She bakes bread and pies and sells them, and he snitches some of the proceeds and buys hooch from a bootlegger named Henrietta. There’s a theory that the reason she doesn’t hide the jack where he couldn’t find it is that it would gum the act. If he wasn’t lit she would never catch him. The reason he yells ‘Rope her’ is that one time a couple of years ago a cowboy was over by the hitching-rack trying a new rope he had just bought at Vawter’s, and when Nev saw him he yelled at him to rope her, and the cowboy did, and ever since Nev always yells it.”

  “Was that her bread at breakfast?”

  “Yes. Salt-rising. You ate four slices.”

  “It’s quite edible.” He went to the car and climbed in. Woody came and I thanked him and paid for the calls, waved to the Vawters, who were still out front, of course wondering who that was with me, got in behind the wheel and started the engine, and eased the car over the rough spot onto the start of the blacktop.

  We had gone three or four miles when Wolfe said, “You’re hitting bumps deliberately.”

  “I am not. It’s the road. Try driving it without hitting bumps. Also this is not your Heron with its special springs.” Bump. “Would it hurt to discuss what you’re going to say to Jessup?”

  “Yes. Jouncing along like this? I’ll decide what to say, and how to say it, after I see him.”

  If you want to visit Whedon’s Graveyard you have to know exactly where it is. There’s no sign and no lane to turn into, though there probably was one when Whedon was on his wheat caper. Now, just beyond a certain patch of aspen at the edge of the blacktop, and just before a culvert over a cut, you leave the road and turn right onto dry grass-dry in August-circle around the foot of a slope, follow the rim of a gulch for a couple of hundred yards, and there it is. There is no visible reason for you to be glad you came. What was presumably once a house with a roof is now a pile of jack-straws for Paul Bunyan to play with if he happens by-old logs and boards sticking up and out at crazy angles, and others scattered around. Also, if you enjoy looking at bare white bones, well weathered, there are some here and there, where visitors have probably tossed them after taking a look. Johnny Vawter says some of them are Whedon’s, but he admits he isn’t a bone expert, and I have never checked his claim that an undertaker in Timberburg agrees with him.

  I had seen Jessup’s car, a dark blue Ford sedan, and it wasn’t there. Except what I have described, nothing and nobody was there. I turned the car around to head back, killed the engine, and said, “A suggestion. If he’s in the back seat you’ll have to twist aroun
d to face him. If you move to the back and he gets in with me he’ll have to do the twisting.”

  “I have never,” he said, “had an important conversation sitting in an automobile.”

  “Certainly you have. Once with Miss Rowan, once with me, and a couple of others. Your memory’s doing fine. You said once that a signal function of the memory is discarding what we want to forget. And where else would you like to sit? This graveyard has no tombstones.”

  He opened the door, slid out backwards, opened the rear door, and climbed in. I skewed around to face him and said, “Much better. Some day you’ll realize what a help I am.”

  “Pfui. Why am I here, two thousand miles from my house?”

  “To see justice done. To right a wrong. Now about Jessup. For sizing him up it may help to know that he was born in Montana, is forty-one years old, and is happily married with three children. University of Montana, which is at Missoula. In my report I didn’t mention that Luther Dawson says Jessup would rather be a judge than a governor, he was fourth in his class at law school, and he-and here he comes.”

  Since we were headed out we didn’t have to twist our necks to see the Ford leave the slope and bounce along the gulch rim. Twenty yards off it stopped, then came on again and nosed in alongside. I had thought it likely that he would have someone with him, not to be outnumbered, but he was alone. He got out, nodded to me, came to the rear door, said to Wolfe, “I’m Tom Jessup,” and offered a hand through the open window. For a second I thought Wolfe was going to revert to normal on me, but he said, “I’m Nero Wolfe,” and put out a hand to permit bodily contact. Jessup said he guessed our car was roomier than his, and we agreed, and he went around to the other side. I leaned across to open the front door, and he took the hint and got in.

  He turned to me. “I came to see what Mr Wolfe has to say, but first I’d like to just mention a point. You said the other day that you didn’t know why a state official was interested in the case, and now it’s evident that-well, that wasn’t true. You did know.”

  “Now listen,” I said. “Instead of calling me a liar, why not ask me? I didn’t know that Mr Wolfe had made a move until I saw him get out of a taxi yesterday evening. As evidence that that isn’t a lie, if I had known he was coming I would have gone to Timberburg to get him, or even to Helena. Not that it matters now, since you’re assuming that it was for him that the Attorney General wanted that report.”

  “Not assuming. I know it was.” He slued around, putting a knee on the seat, to face the rear. “Mr Wolfe, I’m an officer of the law. I have been told by a superior officer of the law that you have come to invest-er, to inquire into the Harvey Greve case, and he requested me-I’ll call it ‘requested’-to extend to you every possible courtesy. I try to-”

  “Didn’t he say ‘cooperate’?”

  “He may have. I try to show courtesy, in my official capacity as well as personally, to any and all of my fellow citizens, but my primary obligation is to the people of this county who chose me to serve them. I’ll be frank with you. This is the first time I have received such a request from the Attorney General. I don’t want to refuse it or ignore it unless I have to. I ask you to be frank with me. I want you to tell me what kind of pressure you brought to bear on Mr Veale to persuade him to take that action.”

  Wolfe nodded. “Naturally you would like to know, and there are many officers of the law who wouldn’t have bothered to ask. Did Mr Veale mention any names?”

  “Only yours-and Mr Goodwin’s.”

  “Then I can’t fully match your frankness. ‘Pressure’ is probably too strong a word. I have no connections in Montana-political or professional or personal-none whatever; but a man I know in New York has. A man who is well disposed to me. Since Mr Veale didn’t name him, I can’t, but I know him to be a man of probity and punctilio. I assume he merely asked a favour of Mr Veale. I am sure he would bring no pressure to bear that you would consider shabby or corrupt-but of course that leaves open the question of the worth of my assurance. Of me. You don’t know me.”

  “I knew your name. Most people do, even out here. I phoned two men in New York, one a district attorney, and was told, in effect, that your word is good but that anyone dealing with you should be sure he knows what your word is.”

  A corner of Wolfe’s mouth raised a little-with him, a smile. “That could have been said of the Delphian oracle. Tell me how you would like my assurance phrased.”

  “You won’t give me his name? Off the record?”

  “It would be on my record. If Mr Veale didn’t, I can’t.” Wolfe cocked his head. “A question, Mr Jessup. Why don’t you ask what kind of cooperation I expect? It’s conceivable that you would have granted it even without a request from Mr Veale.”

  “All right, tell me what you expect.”

  Wolfe closed his eyes and in a moment opened them. “I expect to be enabled to make an inquiry without intolerable hindrance. Mr Goodwin has been trying to for ten days and has been completely frustrated. He has had neither a fulcrum or a lever. No one will tell him anything. He has had no standing-not only no official standing, not even the standing of an empowered agent of Mr Greve, because the attorney who has been hired by Miss Rowan believes that Mr Greve killed that man, as you do.”

  “It isn’t merely a belief. It’s a conclusion based on evidence.”

  “Evidence secured by Mr Haight. I charge Mr Haight with nonfeasance amounting to malfeasance. He has an animus for Mr Greve. Having gathered, as he thinks, enough evidence against Mr Greve to make a case, he has made no effort whatever to explore other possibilities. There were fifteen other people within walking distance of that spot that Thursday afternoon, all of whom had had previous contact with Mr Brodell, and Mr Haight has virtually ignored them. I am not-”

  “Can you support that?”

  “I can,” I said. “They won’t open up about Brodell or murder, but they will about Haight. Ask them.”

  “I am not including Mr Greve’s wife and daughter,” Wolfe said, “because Mr Goodwin and I have eliminated them on evidence that convinces us, though it wouldn’t convince you. Nor would you accept as decisive the evidence that has persuaded us that Mr Greve is innocent, but that doesn’t matter because what we want, all we want, is an opportunity to inquire effectively. It’s conceivable that no evidence exists that will clear Mr Greve, but we assert our right to try to find some. In order to-”

  “I don’t challenge that right. No one does. Go ahead.”

  “Pfui. That’s twaddle and you know it. You might as well tell a man with no legs that you don’t challenge his right to walk. What I ask, what Mr Goodwin and I expect, is active support of that right. We can’t get it from Mr Haight, as you know, but we hope to get it from you. I have been told that in Montana a county attorney proceeds mostly on information supplied by the sheriff and the state police, but that he frequently investigates independently-himself, or members of his staff, or if necessary special investigators chosen by him. Mr Goodwin and I want to investigate the Greve case for you. We want credentials. We are professionally qualified. We would not expect or accept any pay or reimbursement for expenses.”

  “I see.” Jessup looked at me, saw only an open and manly phiz, ready to help, and went back to Wolfe. “That’s it, huh? Mr Veale suggested it?”

  “No, I did. Presumably he thought it reasonable, or he wouldn’t have asked you to see me. The purpose is obvious. Accredited by you, we would not be mere bumptious interlopers from outside-far outside. We would be seen and heard, and we could insist on answers to questions.”

  Jessup smiled, decided it rated better than that, and laughed-a hearty open-mouth laugh that would have been objectionable if it had been aimed at us, but it wasn’t. If I had been sure it was for Sheriff Haight I would have joined in, but that was only a guess.

  He eyed Wolfe. “This needs consideration.”

  Wolfe nodded. “And deserves it.”

  “I don’t know if you realize the potential impact on me
, on my-career. Any resentment you caused would be for you only temporarily, for me permanently. I would be-”

  “Also any plaudits we earned would be for you permanently.”

  “Yes, if you earned any. I would be risking my future on your-uh-conduct. Obviously you hope to clear Greve, and on the evidence in hand you can’t possibly prove that he’s innocent unless you prove that someone else is guilty. Who?”

  “I have no idea, and neither has Mr Goodwin. We haven’t even a specific suspicion. We have only our firm conclusion, on grounds that satisfy us but wouldn’t satisfy you, that Mr Greve is innocent, and we intend to demonstrate it.”

  “Even if I don’t ‘cooperate’?”

  “Yes. If you won’t give us a footing I think Mr Veale might, but if not, we’ll still have two advantages: Miss Rowan’s financial resources and our competence as investigators. It might take months, even years, but we’re committed by our resolution and self-esteem.”

  “Did Mr Veale tell you that he would cooperate if I didn’t?”

  “No. He said he could, but not that he would.”

  “Then you threaten me.”

  “Mr Jessup. You can’t condemn an intention just by calling it a threat.”

  “No, but some intentions are threats. I was advised to make sure I know what your word is. You said, I quote, ‘We haven’t even a specific suspicion.’ I’ll specify. Do you suspect Gilbert Haight?”

  “Only generally, along with others. He had a motive, but he has an alibi, apparently sound. Mr Goodwin’s attempts to test it have been futile, like all his other attempts. You said you would be risking your future on our conduct; you’re risking it now on the conduct of Mr Haight. What if you proceed on the evidence he has supplied, and try Mr Greve and convict him, and a month later, or a year later, we produce evidence that establishes his innocence?”