Rex Stout - The Mountain Cat

He opened the door to leave the bedroom as silently as possible, but Delia opened her eyes. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know. I bribed that cop to keep everybody out. I’ll see.”

“Maybe it’s Clara — no, she has a key.”

“I’ll see.”

Downstairs, when he opened the door, he found two men standing there: the cop, and towering beside him one with a weathered face and nearly white hair, his eyes scarcely more than slits. The cop broke in on Ty:

“Yeah, I know, but the only way to stop him would have been to plug him one. He’s like a burro in everything but size. Maybe you don’t know who he is? It’s Squint Hurley. The one that was tried for the murder of Charlie Brand and got acquitted.”

Ty regarded the old prospector. “What do you want, Hurley?”

“I want to see Charlie Brand’s girl on a business matter.”

“Which one?”

“The older one, I guess she is. The one that was working down at Jackson’s office.”

“That’s Clara. She’s not here. She’s down at the courthouse.”

“When’ll she be back?”

“I don’t know. Possibly not till tonight.”

Hurley grunted. “I’ll wait here on the steps,” he said and turned, tramped the width of the porch, and sat on the top step.

“If you need help moving him” — the cop grinned — “phone the station for a squad.” He detoured around Hurley and strode down the path toward the sidewalk, where a group of schoolgirls had halted and seemed about to enter for an attack on the house.

Ty demanded of the denim shirt that covered the broad back, “What do you want to see Miss Brand about?”

“Who are you?” Hurley asked without turning.

“I’m Tyler Dillon, Clara Brand’s lawyer. Also Delia Brand’s lawyer.”

Hurley grunted. “Wherever you go in this damn town you run into a lawyer.” He twisted his head around. “Delia? That’s the one I found in Jackson’s office the other night with the gun in her hand. Maybe I might see her instead of her sister. Is she here?”

“What do you want to see her about?”

“Business.”

“What kind of business?”

“Important business. It ought to be important to Charlie Brand’s girl if she’s got any curiosity about who killed her dad.”

“Explain it to me and I’ll tell her about it.”

Hurley shook his head. “I guess not. I guess I’ll just wait here till the older one comes.”

Ty stood, frowning, through a long silence. Finally he asked, “You say it is something about the death of her father?”

“It sure is.”

“Wasn’t it you that discovered Brand’s body in that cabin?”

“It sure was.”

“Wait here, will you?”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

Ty went in and back upstairs to the bedroom. Delia had swung her feet around and was sitting on the edge of the bed with her shoulders drooping. “Who is it, Ty? Anyone?”

He told her, and then advised her: “If I were you, Del, I’d go down and see what he has to say. You might as well be doing that as lying there clenching your fists...”

She consented to go, but with no eagerness, saying that if Squint Hurley knew anything he would have told it long ago. She brushed vaguely at her hair without making much impression on it, pulled her shoes from under the bed and put them on, and followed Ty downstairs. Not caring to enter the front room after what had happened there the evening before, she went to the dining room and was seated at the table, plucking at an edge of the embroidered cover, when Ty, having gone to the porch for the visitor, ushered him in. They sat. Hurley, on the imitation Sheraton chair, looked even more incongruous than he had in the courthouse office, but Delia didn’t notice it. Looking at him, she was trying to control the quivering of her nerves as she remembered the scene when that man who had been accused of killing her father had last entered a room and found her there.

She mastered the quivering and said, “Mr. Dillon says you want to see me about something.”

Hurley nodded. “You or your sister.” Keeping his squint directed at her, he aimed a thumb at Ty. “We don’t need him. I don’t do much talking anyhow and I do it better with just one.”

“That’s all right. He’s my... my lawyer.”

Hurley grunted. “You’re starting in awful young to have lawyers. I don’t know, maybe I ought to wait for your sister. It’s a matter of business. I’ve got to get back into the hills and I want a stake. I know a place in the Cheeford range—”

“Mr. Dillon said you told him it was about my father.”

“Sure it is. But I’d like to mention about the stake first. You’re Charlie Brand’s girl and I’d trust you same as I would your dad. I’d go ahead and tell you and trust you for the ante, but what makes it hard to talk is this lawyer sitting here. I go on and tell you and then he begins to talk and when he gets through neither one of us has got anything.”

Ty said, “I’ll go out if you want me to. But if you tell Miss Brand something, and she wants to grubstake you, I not only won’t talk against it, I’ll help her put up the stake. It’s true I’m her lawyer, but also I’m... we’re going to be married.”

“Oh.” The prospector slowly shook his head. “That don’t make it any better. I expect you’ll find it makes it worse. But I’m no good as a trader — if I was, I wouldn’t be reduced to asking a woman for a stake at my age. Anyhow, I ought to tell it for Charlie Brand’s sake, and by all hell, I won’t tell it to that coyote up at the courthouse. I told him too much already.”

“You mean Baker? The county attorney?”

“That’s him. He had me in there yesterday and I mentioned maybe he would stake me, and from the way he took it you might think I was a desert rat. I had already told him that that day when I got to the cabin and found Charlie Brand there dead, when I turned him over there was a piece of paper under him with writing on it, and I stuck it in my boot lining the way I do, and when I put Charlie on his horse and took him out to Sugarbowl and Ken Chambers came and began to slobber his bile, I didn’t mention the paper because I knew it wouldn’t do any good and I thought I’d better hang onto it. I never did mention it. I would have to Lem Sammis later, but he treated me like a desert rat, too. So I never mentioned it to anyone till Tuesday morning this week when I showed it to Dan Jackson and give it to him and he put it in his wallet, and he staked me. Three hundred dollars. I paid a couple of debts, and that night like a jackass I went to The Haven with Slim Fraser and dropped it all on the wheel. So since Jackson had been glad to get that paper I thought he might put up another stake and I went upstairs to see him. That was when I found you there with that gun in your hand.”

He shifted his squint to Ty and declared, “You ain’t much of a lawyer or you’d be asking questions.”

“Go on and tell it.”

“I already told it. That’s all. That’s what I told that Baker yesterday. Except that Baker told me that the piece of paper wasn’t in Jackson’s wallet when they went over him, so whoever killed him must’ve took it, so since they didn’t even take his money from him it must’ve been the piece of paper they killed him for. So whoever killed Charlie Brand two years ago killed Dan Jackson Tuesday night. That’s plain reasoning. Then of course Baker wanted to know what was on the paper and I told him I couldn’t tell him because I could read reading but I couldn’t read writing. So I told him it was a piece of white paper about the size of my hand, and it had been folded up, and the writing on it was five or six words, and that was all I could tell him—”

“You couldn’t tell him what was written on it?”