At the parking lot behind the café I put my bag in the back of Lily’s station wagon, among the items she had had on her list, before I got in behind the wheel. She was sitting straight so her back wouldn’t touch the seat back, which the slanting August sun had been trying to fry. My side was okay. I backed out from the slot. On a list of the differences between Lily and me it would be near the top that I park so I won’t have to back out when I leave and she doesn’t.
It was only two short blocks to the Presto gas station, where I turned in and stopped at the pump. The gauge said half full and the gas in the tank at the ranch cost nine cents less per gallon, but I wanted Lily to have a look at a person named Gilbert Haight who might be there. He was—a lanky loose-limbed kid whose long neck helped to make up his six feet—but he was wiping the windshield of another car, and Lily had to twist around to get focused on him as I told the other attendant to fill it up with Special. But when the other car rolled off, the kid stood looking at us for half a minute and then walked over to my open window and said, “Nice morning.”
Actually he didn’t say, “Nice morning;” he said, “Nice mahrnin’.” But I’m not going to try to give you the native lingo, at least not often. I only want to report what happened, and that would complicate it too much and slow me down.
I agreed that it was a nice mahrnin’, to be polite, though it was more than an hour past noon, and he said, “My dad told me not to talk to you.”
I nodded. “Yeah, he would.” His dad was Morley Haight, the county sheriff. “He has practically told me not to talk to anybody, but I can’t break the habit, and anyway it’s how I make a living.”
“Uhuh. Fuzz.”
Television and radio certainly spread words around. “Not me,” I said. “Your dad is fuzz, but I’m private. If I asked you how you spent the day Thursday a week ago, you could say it was none of my business. When your father asked me I told him.”
“So I heard.” His eyes went to Lily and came back to me. “You’ve been asking around about me. I’d just as soon save you some trouble.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“I didn’t kill that skunk.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to know. That narrows it down.”
“It’s a insult. Look at it.” He ignored his colleague, who had filled my order and was there behind his elbow. “The first shot, from behind, got his shoulder and turned him around. The second shot, from in front, got him in the throat and broke his neck and killed him. Look at that. It’s a insult. I have never used more than one cartridge for a deer. Ask anybody. I can take a popgun and slice off the head of a snake at thirty yards. I can do it every time. My dad told me not to talk to you, but I wanted you to know that. ”
He turned and went, toward a car that was stopping at the other pump. His colleague took a step and said, “Two-sixty-three,” and I reached for my wallet.
When we were under way again, heading northeast, I asked Lily, “Well?”
“I pass,” she said. “I wanted to have a look at him, that’s all right, but you told me once that it’s stupid to suppose looking at a man will help you decide if he’s a murderer. I don’t want to be stupid and I pass. But what he said? That it’s an insult?”
“Oh, that.” I bore right at a fork. “He can shoot all right. Three people have told me so. And any damn fool knows that if you’re going to plug a man, not just hurt him, kill him, you don’t go for his shoulder. Or his neck either. But he may also be sharp. He might have figured it that everybody knew he was a good shot, so he made it look as if he wasn’t. He had had plenty of time to think it over.”
She considered that for couple of miles and then asked, “Are you sure he knew that Brodell had—that he was the father of her baby?”
“Hell, everybody in Lame Horse knew it. And beyond.
Of course they also knew that Gil Haight was set on her. Last Tuesday—no, Wednesday—he told a man that he still wanted to marry her and was going to.”
“That’s love for you. The sharp right is just ahead.”
I said I knew it.
The twenty-four miles from Timberburg to Lame Horse was all blacktop except for two short stretches—one where it dived down into a deep gully and up again, and one where winters pushed so much rock through and around that they had quit trying to keep it surfaced. For the first few miles out of Timberburg there were some trees and bushes, then broken range for the rest of the way.
The population of Lame Horse was 160, give or take a dozen. The blacktop stopped right in front of Vawter’s General Store, but the road went on, curving left a little ahead. Having been to Timberburg, we needed nothing at Vawter’s, so we didn’t stop. From there it was 2.8 miles to the turnoff to Lily’s ranch, and another 300 yards to the turnoff to her cabin. In that three miles you climbed nearly 2000 feet. To get to the ranch buildings you crossed a bridge over Berry Creek, but from there the creek took a swing to make a big loop, and the cabin was in the loop, only a few hundred yards inside the ranch boundary. To get to the ranch buildings on foot from the cabin you had to cross the creek, either by the bridge or, much shorter, by fording just outside the cabin. In August there was a spot where it could be done by stone-stepping. A better name for it would be boulder-bouncing.
My favorite spot on earth is only a seven-minute walk from where I live, Nero Wolfe’s house on West 35th Street: Herald Square, where you can see more different kinds of people in ten minutes than anywhere else I know of. One day I saw the top cock of the Mafia step back to let a Sunday-school teacher from Iowa go first through the revolving door of the world’s largest department store. If you ask how I knew who they were, I didn’t, but that’s what they looked like. But for anyone who is fed up with people and noise, the favorite spot could be Lily Rowan’s cabin clearing. I admit there is a little noise, Berry Creek making a fuss about the rocks that won’t move, but after a couple of days you hear it only when you want to. The big firs start farther up, but there are plenty of trees right there, mostly lodgepole pine, and downstream is Beaver Meadow; and just upstream, where the creek swings around again to the north, is a cliff of solid rock you can’t see the top of from this side of the creek. If you need exercise and want to throw stones at gophers it’s only a three-minute walk down the lane to the road.
The cabin is logs of course, and is all on one level. Crossing a stone-paved terrace with a roof, you enter a room 34 by 52, with a 10-foot fireplace at the rear, and for living that’s it. For privacy or sleeping, there are two doors at the right, one to Lily’s room and the other to a guest room. A door at the left leads to a long hall, and when you take it, first comes a big kitchen, then Mimi’s room, then a big storeroom, and then three guest rooms. There are six baths, complete with tubs and showers. A very nice little cabin. Except for the beds, the furniture you sit on is nearly all wicker. The rugs in all rooms are Red Indian, and on the walls, instead of pictures, are Indian blankets and rugs. Three of them in the big room are genuine bayetas. There is just one picture on view anywhere, a framed photograph of Lily’s father and mother on the piano—one of the few things she carts back and forth from New York.
Some of the items Lily had got at Timberburg that morning were for the kitchen and storeroom, and with them we saved steps by skirting the terrace to a door direct to the hall. There was no offer of help from the dark-eyed beauty with a pointed chin who was on a chair in the sun off the edge of the terrace. Since her halter and shorts didn’t total more than three square feet, there was a lot of smooth tan skin showing, with her bare legs out straight to the foot extension. She had greeted us with a graceful wave as we got out of the car. Back from the deliveries to the kitchen and storeroom, Lily took the few things that were left, and I backed the car into a space among the lodgepoles and got my paper bag. Lily had stopped by Diana’s chair to give her one of the packages.
Her name was Diana Kadany. A house guest at Lily’s cabin might be anyone from a tired-out social worker to a famous composer of the k
ind of music I can get along without. That year there were three, counting me, which was par. Discussing Diana Kadany one day when we were up at the second pool getting trout for supper, I had guessed she was twenty-two and Lily had guessed twenty-five. She had made a sort of a hit the previous winter in an off-Broadway play entitled Not Me You Don’t, the kind of play that would go fine with music by that famous composer I mentioned, and she had been invited to Montana only because Lily, having helped stake the play, was curious about her. Of course that was risky, taking on a question mark for a month, but it hadn’t been too bad. It was only a minor nuisance that she practiced being seductive with any male who happened to be handy. Of course Wade Worthy and I were the handiest.
As I crossed the big room to the door to my room, the one at the far right, Wade Worthy was at the table in the corner, banging away on the Underwood. He was the other guest, but a special kind of guest. He was doing a job. For two years Lily had collected material about her father, and when there was about half a ton of it she had started looking for someone to write the book, thinking that with the help of a friend of hers who was an editor at the Parthenon Press it might take a week. It had taken nearly three months. Of the first twenty-two professional authors considered, three were busy writing books, four were getting ready to, two were in hospitals, one was too mad about Vietnam to talk about anything else, three were out of the country, one was experimenting with LSD, two were Republicans and wouldn’t write the kind of book Lily had in mind about a Tammany Hall man who had made a pile building sewers and laying pavements, one wanted a year to decide, three said they weren’t interested without giving a reason, one was trying to make up his mind whether to switch to fiction, and one was drunk.
Finally, in May, Lily and the editor had tagged Wade Worthy. According to the editor, no one in the literary world had ever heard of him until three years ago, when his biography of Abbott Lawrence Lowell had been published. It had done only fairly well, but his second book, about Heywood Broun, with the title The Head and the Heart, had nearly made the bestseller list. Lily’s offer of a fat advance, with only half to be deducted from royalties—which the editor strongly disapproved—had appealed to him, and there he was at the typewriter, working on the outline. The title was to be A Stripe of the Tiger: the Life and Work of James Gilmore Rowan. Lily was hoping as many copies of it would be sold as there were steers branded Bar JR. The JR stood for James Rowan.
In my room I emptied the bag, put the belt around my middle, the toothpaste in the bathroom, and the notebook and magnifying glass in my pockets, went out again with the other three items, and detoured to the corner in the big room to give Wade Worthy the typewriter ribbon. Outside, Lily was still with Diana Kadany. I told her I’d take the car because I might go on to Lame Horse or Farnham’s, and she told me not to be late for supper. I got in the car, rolled down the lane to the road, turned left and left again in a sixth of a mile at the turnoff, crossed the bridge over Berry Creek, went through an open gate which was usually shut, passed corrals and two barns and a bunkhouse—which Pete Ingalls called the dorm—and stopped at the edge of a big square of dusty gravel with a tree in the middle, in front of Harvey Greve’s house.
Chapter 2
I could tell you a lot about the Bar JR Ranch—how many acres, how many head, the trial and error with alfalfa that had been mostly error, the fence problem, the bookkeeping complications, the open-range question, and so on—but that has nothing to do with a dead dude and how to get Harvey back where he belonged. Irrelevant and immaterial. But the person who appeared inside the screen door as I got out of the car was relevant. As I approached she opened the door and I went in.
I have never met a nineteen-year-old boy who gave me the impression that he knew things I wouldn’t understand, but three girls around that age have, and little Alma Greve was one of them. Don’t ask me if it was the deep-set brown eyes that seldom opened wide, or the curve of her lips that seemed to be starting a smile but never made it, or what, because I don’t know. When I had mentioned it to Lily a couple of years back she had said, “Oh, come on. It’s not her, it’s you. Every pretty girl a man sees, either she’s a mystery he could learn from, or she’s an innocent he could—uh—edify. Either way, he’s always wrong. Of course with you she’s seldom a mystery because what don’t you understand?”
I had grabbed a clump of paintbrush and thrown it at her.
I asked Alma who was around, and she said her mother was taking a nap and the baby was asleep. She asked me if her mother had asked me to get fly swatters, and I said no, they were for Pete.
“Maybe we could sit and talk a little,” I said.
Her head was tilted back because her eyes were nine inches lower than mine. “I told you,” she said, “I’m talked out. But all right.”
She turned and I followed her into what they called the front room, but they could have called it the trophy room. Harvey and Carol, his wife, had formerly both been rodeo stars, and the walls were covered with pictures—him bulldogging steers and both of them riding broncs and tying calves. Also there were displays of ribbons they had won, and medals, and in a glass case on a table was a big silver cup Harvey had got one year at Calgary, with his name engraved on it. Alma went to a couch by the fireplace and sat with her legs crossed, and I took a nearby chair. Her skirt was mini—she never wore shorts—but her legs were no match for Diana’s, in either length or caliber. There was nothing wrong with what there was of them.
“You look all right,” I said. “You’re getting your sleep.”
She nodded. “Go right ahead. Ride me. I’m saddle-broke.”
“You chew the bit.” I regarded her. “Look, Alma. I love you dearly, we all love you, but can’t you get it in your head that someone is going to take the rap for killing Philip Brodell, and it’s going to be your father unless we produce a miracle?”
“This is Montana,” she said.
“Yeah. The Treasure State. Gold and silver.”
“My father won’t take any rap. This is Montana. They’ll acquit him.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody had to tell me. I was born here.”
“But too late. Fifty years ago, or even less, a Montana jury might not convict a man who had shot a man who had seduced his daughter. But not today, not even if you go on the stand with the baby in your arms and say you’re glad he killed him. I’ve decided to tell you exactly what I think. I think you have an idea about who did kill him, maybe even actual knowledge, and you don’t want him to take the rap, and you think your father won’t have to because they won’t convict him. You’ve admitted you’re glad somebody killed him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Nuts. I can repeat it verbatim, all of it. You’re glad he’s dead.”
“All right, I am.”
“And you don’t want anybody to get tagged for it. For instance, suppose you have reason to think that Gil Haight killed him. Gil says he was in Timberburg all day that Thursday, he has told several people that, but suppose you know he wasn’t? Suppose he was here that day, and he said things, and from here it’s only a couple of miles to where Brodell was shot, and he had a gun in his car. But you’re saving it because you think your father will be acquitted, and you also think that if he isn’t, if he’s convicted of first-degree murder and sent up, you could get him out by telling then what you know. Well, you couldn’t, for several reasons, the best one being that nobody would believe you. But if you tell me now I can take it from there and we’ll see what happens. Gil Haight would stand as good a chance as your father does. He’s a local boy with a clean record, and he was hoping to marry you, and when the man who had seduced you last summer showed up again this summer he went off his nut. At least as good a chance as your father, maybe better.”
There was a sound from the other side of an open door, not the one to the hall, which could have been a baby turning over and kicking the crib, and she turned her head. Silence, and she returned to me. �
��Gil wasn’t here that day,” she said.
“I didn’t say he was, I was only supposing. There are other possibilities. Someone might have killed him for some other reason, nothing to do with you. If so, the reason was probably a carry-over from last year, because Brodell had only been here three days this year. If it was something from last year, for instance some kind of trouble with Farnham, he might have mentioned it to you. When a man gets close enough with a woman to make a baby he might mention anything. Damn it, if you would drop your cockeyed idea that your father will be acquitted, and put your mind on it, you might give me a start.”
Her lips almost made the smile. “You think my mind’s not on it?”
“Your feelings are on it, but your mind, no.”
“Certainly my mind’s on it.” She uncrossed her legs and put her hands on her knees. “Listen, Archie. I’ve told you ten times, I think my father killed him.”
“And I’ve told you ten times, you can’t. I don’t believe it. You’re not a halfwit, and you’d have to be one to live with him nineteen years and not—”
A voice said, “She’s not a halfwit, she’s just a dope.”
Carol was there in the doorway. “My daughter,” she said, “the only one I’ve got, and what a piece of luck that was.” She was coming. “You might as well quit on her. I have.” She looked down at Alma. “Please go and milk a mule or something. I want to talk with Archie.”
Alma stayed put. “He said he wanted to talk with me. I don’t want to talk at all. What’s the use?”
“None at all.” Carol sat, on the couch, at arm’s length from Alma. From the neck down she was close to frowzy, with a rumpled shirt and old brown work pants, and socks but no shoes, but her face could still have been the face of a cowgirl in her twenties except for the wrinkles around the sharp brown eyes. The eyes focused on me. “I guess you haven’t scared up any dust or you wouldn’t be here.”
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