Rex Stout - The Mountain Cat

“Nobody here seemed to give a damn about anything I might say this morning. You were all so sure of what you had you didn’t want anything more from anybody. Besides, all I could do was describe him, I didn’t know who he was, and what good is a description?”

“So instead of telling us you went and planted yourself—”

“Wait a minute, Bill.” Phelan reached for the phone again, and called the station. In a moment he spoke: “Mac? Frank. That order I just gave you about a bum named Al Rowley. Make it hot. Put every man you can get on it. I want him and no mistake, and quick. And take him good. It may be murder.”

As Phelan hung up, the sheriff barked at Pellett, “Is that the idea? That this bum stole the bag with the gun in it and murdered Jackson?”

“No. He couldn’t have, because I took the bag away from him.”

“You did what ?”

“I caught him stealing the bag from her car and I took it.”

“What did you do with it? — Wait a minute.” The sheriff included the two detectives and the cop in a look. “You fellows go out front and wait there. The three of you. And keep your traps shut. Understand?”

They said they did, with evident reluctance, and marched out. The sheriff leaned back and sighed heavily.

Phelan said, “Maybe we ought to get this the way it happened. In order. This is quite a — quite a surprise.”

“It’s all of that.” Tuttle fastened his eyes on Pellett and demanded, “What did you do with the bag?”

Pellett shook his head. “I think Frank’s right. You ought to have it in the order it happened. In the first place, my niece came to see me yesterday afternoon—”

“What for?”

“It doesn’t matter what for. It had nothing to do with killing Dan Jackson, you can be damn sure of that. The fact is, she wanted me to go with her to persuade Jackson not to fire Clara — my other niece. I told her it would be better if we didn’t go together, and that I had an appointment to call on him that afternoon on another matter and would speak to him about it then. Not long after she left my place, I left, to keep my appointment with Jackson. He had phoned that he wanted to consult me about some information he had got hold of regarding the death of my brother-in-law two years ago. While I was looking for a parking space on Halley Street I saw Delia’s car there. I had to park up ahead, and as I walked back I saw a man closing the door of Delia’s car with her bag in his hand. He didn’t look like a man she might have sent for it, so I confronted him and asked him if it was his bag. He said, ‘It’s not yours, is it?’ and I said, ‘No, it belongs to my niece, and so does that car.’ He said, ‘Then do me a favor and take it to her,’ and shoved it into my hand and walked off. He was so damn cool about it I just stared at his back.”

“You didn’t call a cop?”

“With the bag in my hand, what was there to tell a cop?”

“Did anybody see all that? Anyone stop to look at you?”

“Not that I know of.” Pellett was frowning.

“Okay. You’re standing there on the sidewalk holding the bag. Then what?”

“I started for Jackson’s office. I had intended to wait there by my niece’s car until she came out, because I didn’t want to interrupt her talk with Jackson, and I went to the corner and had a glass of beer. That took five minutes, maybe a little more. When I went back her car was still there, and it occurred to me she might have got through with Jackson and gone somewhere else nearby, so I went to the entrance there alongside The Haven, and went in and climbed the stairs. When I got nearly up, about two or three steps from the top, something hit me on the side of the head. I must have rolled all the way down. When I came to I was there at the bottom landing, and my niece and Jackson were standing there—”

“Company halt!” said Tuttle savagely. “I’ll stop you if I’ve heard it! And the bag was gone? Sure the bag was gone? Sure the bag was gone! And the ones who found you there unconscious were your niece, who is in a cell, and Jackson, who is dead!”

“That’s right.” Pellett raised his hand and rubbed the left side of his jaw, slowly and tenderly. “Look, Sheriff. Don’t figure on getting me sore. I knew what your attitude would be, and that’s why I went there and laid for that man in case he might show up. But while it was my niece and Jackson that found me, because they were in his office and heard me rolling downstairs, Jackson went to The Haven right away, to telephone, and someone from there came back with him. I think he’s the manager or the bouncer, because it was him that came out and spoke to me today. And before they helped me upstairs to Jackson’s office a police sergeant came, Gil Moffett, and a doctor. They decided I had been hit with a piece of ore out of that old bin up there; Jackson found it on the floor near the head of the stairs. I suppose Gil Moffett reported it; anyway, you can ask him. I had a little natural curiosity about who had tried to crack my skull open, and I phoned Gil at his house last night and he said they hadn’t found any tracks.”

Tuttle asked with a scowl, “Was it your theory that someone trailed you up and beaned you when you got to the top?”

“I didn’t have any theory. But he couldn’t have trailed me up and then got a piece of ore from that bin. He must have been already up there.”

“Yeah, I was expecting that. It was somebody already up there and so it was Jackson. Huh?”

“It couldn’t have been. My niece was in his office with him at the time I was hit.”

“That’s too bad. And the minute you came to, you looked around for the bag and it was gone.”

“No, I didn’t. I was groggy. After they got me up to Jackson’s office Gil Moffett helped me go through my pockets to see if anything was gone, but all I had that amounted to anything was my wallet with about sixty dollars in it and my driver’s license, and that was there, so I told Gil nothing had been taken. I was still dazed. Then a little later, when I was talking with Jackson, I remembered about the bag, and Jackson and I went to look for it, and it wasn’t there. We looked upstairs and down. It was gone.”

“Had Moffett and the doctor left before you missed the bag?”

“Yes, and my niece too. We were alone.”

“Did you see anybody or hear anything before you got hit?”

“Not a damn thing. It’s dark up there in that hall.”

The sheriff leaned back and gazed at him a while. Then he turned to the chief of police, still scowling. “How do you like it, Frank? Got any suggestions?”

Phelan slowly and reflectively shook his head. “I don’t know, Bill. We might go into details a little more.”

“Go ahead.”

Phelan did so. He wasn’t aggressively skeptical, as the sheriff had been, but he wanted to know; that was his tone as he questioned Quinby Pellett. He was painstaking; he covered, thoroughly, everything that happened up to the time that Pellett and Jackson had searched for the bag, but he found no discrepancy, and the only new fact he got was that Pellett thought it possible that the murder of Jackson was connected with the murder two years previously of Charlie Brand. Pellett could support that surmise only by saying that Jackson had summoned him to the office for the purpose of discussing a new angle on the Charlie Brand murder, and had shown him a piece of paper alleged to have been found in the cabin in the Silverside Hills where Brand had been killed; and since Jackson had been killed a few hours later, it seemed likely that there might be a connection. Asked what was on the piece of paper, Pellett couldn’t say; his head had been so befuddled from the blow he had got that they had postponed the rest of the discussion until the next day and, after the futile search for the bag, he had gone home. It was while they were on that that the phone rang, and Tuttle, after answering it, handed it across to Phelan.