Rex Stout - The Mountain Cat

“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.