Rex Stout - The Mountain Cat

Clara stared.

“I ask you, how would you feel?”

“It’s a silly question,” she said shortly.

“Maybe and maybe not.” Baker was earnest, urgent. “I’m not accusing him of it, because I’m not ready to. But here are some facts. It’s a cinch that someone framed your sister for Jackson’s murder — her gun, her handbag there on the desk. But whoever did it must have known that Delia would be going there that evening. Who did know it? Even you didn’t; you’ve said so. There was only one person who knew it, and that was Sammis; he himself had written the note for her to take to Jackson. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t think—” Clara stopped. In a moment, “It’s absurd,” she snapped.

“You don’t mean absurd, you mean it’s hard for you to believe. Lots of things are hard to believe, and Lem Sammis has done a few of them. You know as well as I do how much tenderness he has for anyone he has decided to crush. Those are the facts about Delia. Now you. It must have been Sammis who told you what people were saying about your mother. Wasn’t it?”

No answer.

Baker spread his palms. “It must have been. Why did he decide to tell you that, and the part that scandal gives Toale in your mother’s suicide? Did you go at once to see Toale? You did. Was he murdered? He was. Under circumstances that threw suspicion on you? Yes.”

Clara shook her head. “It’s simply fantastic.”

“It’s not fantastic at all. There’s a logical connection right straight through. Sammis thinks that I suspect he or his daughter shot Jackson because of his affairs with other women. I don’t. At least I’m inclined not to since last night. I more strongly suspect that Jackson was killed because he had recently got hold of evidence that might lead to the solution of the murder of your father two years ago.”

“My father—”

“Yes. That comes from Quinby Pellett, your uncle, and a man named Squint Hurley. And now Toale. You know what he told your sister while he was dying. With a hole in his lung and that bullet in his spine, he got himself back to his car and drove to your house and walked in there to tell it — and then all he told was about the marked bill and its being taken from him after he was shot. If he had it on him it was taken, all right. That marked bill, again, was evidence that might solve the murder of your father. So Toale was killed for the same reason that Jackson was. And he was killed by someone who either murdered your father or had a hand in it. And that someone was Lem Sammis. Well?”

“I don’t believe it. It’s crazy.”

“It’s far from crazy.” Baker leaned at her again. “You’re thinking, of course, that Sammis was your father’s partner and best friend. But you must have heard some of the talk around that time about your father and Amy Jackson — or maybe you didn’t, since you’re Brand’s daughter. Anyway there was talk and certainly Sammis heard it, and you know what he thinks of his daughter. It’s the one spot in him that’s probably tender clear to the bottom. So it’s far from crazy.”

Clara shook her head.

“You don’t believe it?”

“No.”

“You don’t even think it’s possible?”

“No.”

“All right, you don’t. You’re shocked. You’re incredulous. You’re probably wondering, or you will, why I’ve told you all this, since it’s ten to one that you’ll pass it on to Sammis as soon as you get a chance. I’ve risked that and told you about it because I’ve got to get a lot of information from someone who has been close to Jackson and Sammis and I’m expecting it from you. I want you to think about it. I’m going to put you in the next room, alone, and I ask you to think it over for an hour, two hours, as long as you want to. Remember the facts I’ve told you. Remember all the little things, and big ones too, you’ve heard and seen back over the years. Consider it all. I don’t think you want to be loyal to Lem Sammis or help him cover up if there’s any amount of possibility that he killed your father or was responsible for it, and Tuesday night and last night he was willing to direct suspicion at you and your sister in order to divert it from himself. Will you go in that room and think it over?”

Clara was gazing at him with fresh trouble in her bloodshot eyes. But she said firmly, “I don’t think I need to.”

“I’m going to put you in there. Will you think it over? Then I want to have another talk with you.”

“Do I have to? Stay in there?”

“For a while, yes.”

“Well... I would know better what to think if I could have a talk with Mr. Sammis first.”

“No doubt,” said Baker drily. “I’m sorry. Nothing doing.”

“Then if I could telephone my sister. Or Mr. Dillon.”

“You can do that afterward.” Baker abruptly stood up. “It’s comfortable in there. Come on. It’s far more comfortable than the quarters you’d have if you had been charged with murder, as it was intended you should be.”

By two o’clock Friday afternoon, the hour at which Clara Brand was shut in a room alone to think it over, the commotion at the Brand house on Vulcan Street had almost completely subsided. Cars, slowing down for their occupants to stare, frequently passed in the street and a uniformed policeman was hanging around the sidewalk in front to discourage collections of pedestrians, but that was all. Intent heavy-footed men were no longer peeking under shrubs to find where a revolver, hurled through a window by Delia Brand after shooting Rufus Toale, might have landed; that activity had been stopped some five hours earlier, when the ludicrous straw hat and the bloodstains had been discovered at the edge of the flower bed in the churchyard, as had been a similar exhaustive search inside the house itself. The same discovery had freed Delia from any further badgering, which had gone on intermittently all night; at least twenty times she had had to repeat her conversation with Toale after his staggering in, or rather, his monologue; and thrice she had re-enacted the scene for them, with her on the couch as she had been and Sheriff Tuttle in the chair doing Toale.

Now, at two o’clock, there was no one in the house with her except Ty Dillon, not even the reliquiae of the pastor who had fought his way there on God’s errand and had been choked to death by his own blood before he could complete it. Upstairs in Delia’s bedroom, she was lying down and Ty was slowly pacing the floor. Each time he turned at the end of his beat he halted and gazed at her, as she lay there on her back with her eyes closed and her fists clenched at her sides, but he said nothing. They had talked it all out. They were agreed: that they believed Clara’s story and she had no knowledge of the shooting of Toale; that whatever had motivated Lem Sammis’s request to Clara to withhold information from the county attorney, she should disregard it and tell everything she knew about everything; that if she were arrested Phil Escott should be her counsel; that anything like peace of mind and a tolerable existence for the Brand girls, in Wyoming or anywhere else, was impossible until the murders of Dan Jackson and Rufus Toale were cleared up; that the murder of their own father two years ago should be included, in view of the stigma which gossip had attached to their mother’s name; that they should not run away from it but should stick in Cody and see it through; and that if they, Ty and Delia, were to do anything about it, they hadn’t the slightest idea where to begin. Quinby Pellett, who had been there and talked with them for two hours, had likewise agreed to all those points, including the last one; he had no more cards up his sleeve, he confessed in cold and impotent rage, like his knowledge of the theft of Delia’s handbag; and he had gone off with vague mutterings about what he would do and what he would see to. That was the hopeless and dreary situation at two o’clock when Ty, halting for the hundredth time to gaze at Delia and to wish to God she would relax or take the drug the doctor had left her, heard the doorbell ring.