Rex Stout - Death of a Dude

He held it out and I took it. "Archie Goodwin."

"Do you know where Whedon's Graveyard is?"

"Sure."

"I'll leave in about ten minutes-perhaps twenty-and meet you there. Will anyone be with you besides Mr Wolfe?"

I said no, and he said all right and hung up. I told Wolfe, "We're to meet him at Whedon's Graveyard, which is a little farther from Timberburg than from here. About ten miles."

"A cemetery?"

"No. A long time ago a man named Whedon got the idea that he could grow wheat there and he tried it, and the story is that he starved to death, but I doubt that. This begins to look interesting. Jessup doesn't want you to come to his office because the sheriffs office is also in the courthouse." I looked at my watch: 4:55. "I'll ring Miss Rowan and tell her we'll be late for supper."

While I was doing that, and getting the charges from the operator, he took a look at a few items of cultural material. When we went out I expected to see Woody there, but he wasn't. He was with a little group in front of Vawter's, watching a race up the road a little-or rather, a chase-coming this way. A scrawny little guy in Levi's, no shirt, was loping down the middle of the road, and after him, some ten yards back, was a fat red-faced woman with a long leather strap. As he neared Vawter's the man yelled at the group, "Rope her! Goddammit, rope her!" He yelled it again when he saw Wolfe and me. When he was about even with us he swerved to the right, stumbled and nearly fell, and headed for a path which curved around the side of a house, with the woman nearly at his tail. She almost had him as they disappeared back of the house.

Wolfe looked at me with his brows up.

"Local routine," I said. "About once a month. Mr and Mrs Nev Barnes. She bakes bread and pies and sells them, and he snitches some of the proceeds and buys hooch from a bootlegger named Henrietta. There's a theory that the reason she doesn't hide the jack where he couldn't find it is that it would gum the act. If he wasn't lit she would never catch him. The reason he yells 'Rope her' is that one time a couple of years ago a cowboy was over by the hitching-rack trying a new rope he had just bought at Vawter's, and when Nev saw him he yelled at him to rope her, and the cowboy did, and ever since Nev always yells it."

"Was that her bread at breakfast?"

"Yes. Salt-rising. You ate four slices."

"It's quite edible." He went to the car and climbed in. Woody came and I thanked him and paid for the calls, waved to the Vawters, who were still out front, of course wondering who that was with me, got in behind the wheel and started the engine, and eased the car over the rough spot onto the start of the blacktop.

We had gone three or four miles when Wolfe said, "You're hitting bumps deliberately."

"I am not. It's the road. Try driving it without hitting bumps. Also this is not your Heron with its special springs." Bump. "Would it hurt to discuss what you're going to say to Jessup?"

"Yes. Jouncing along like this? I'll decide what to say, and how to say it, after I see him."

If you want to visit Whedon's Graveyard you have to know exactly where it is. There's no sign and no lane to turn into, though there probably was one when Whedon was on his wheat caper. Now, just beyond a certain patch of aspen at the edge of the blacktop, and just before a culvert over a cut, you leave the road and turn right onto dry grass-dry in August-circle around the foot of a slope, follow the rim of a gulch for a couple of hundred yards, and there it is. There is no visible reason for you to be glad you came. What was presumably once a house with a roof is now a pile of jack-straws for Paul Bunyan to play with if he happens by-old logs and boards sticking up and out at crazy angles, and others scattered around. Also, if you enjoy looking at bare white bones, well weathered, there are some here and there, where visitors have probably tossed them after taking a look. Johnny Vawter says some of them are Whedon's, but he admits he isn't a bone expert, and I have never checked his claim that an undertaker in Timberburg agrees with him.

I had seen Jessup's car, a dark blue Ford sedan, and it wasn't there. Except what I have described, nothing and nobody was there. I turned the car around to head back, killed the engine, and said, "A suggestion. If he's in the back seat you'll have to twist around to face him. If you move to the back and he gets in with me he'll have to do the twisting."

"I have never," he said, "had an important conversation sitting in an automobile."

"Certainly you have. Once with Miss Rowan, once with me, and a couple of others. Your memory's doing fine. You said once that a signal function of the memory is discarding what we want to forget. And where else would you like to sit? This graveyard has no tombstones."

He opened the door, slid out backwards, opened the rear door, and climbed in. I skewed around to face him and said, "Much better. Some day you'll realize what a help I am."

"Pfui. Why am I here, two thousand miles from my house?"

"To see justice done. To right a wrong. Now about Jessup. For sizing him up it may help to know that he was born in Montana, is forty-one years old, and is happily married with three children. University of Montana, which is at Missoula. In my report I didn't mention that Luther Dawson says Jessup would rather be a judge than a governor, he was fourth in his class at law school, and he-and here he comes."

Since we were headed out we didn't have to twist our necks to see the Ford leave the slope and bounce along the gulch rim. Twenty yards off it stopped, then came on again and nosed in alongside. I had thought it likely that he would have someone with him, not to be outnumbered, but he was alone. He got out, nodded to me, came to the rear door, said to Wolfe, "I'm Tom Jessup," and offered a hand through the open window. For a second I thought Wolfe was going to revert to normal on me, but he said, "I'm Nero Wolfe," and put out a hand to permit bodily contact. Jessup said he guessed our car was roomier than his, and we agreed, and he went around to the other side. I leaned across to open the front door, and he took the hint and got in.

He turned to me. "I came to see what Mr Wolfe has to say, but first I'd like to just mention a point. You said the other day that you didn't know why a state official was interested in the case, and now it's evident that-well, that wasn't true. You did know."

"Now listen," I said. "Instead of calling me a liar, why not ask me? I didn't know that Mr Wolfe had made a move until I saw him get out of a taxi yesterday evening. As evidence that that isn't a lie, if I had known he was coming I would have gone to Timberburg to get him, or even to Helena. Not that it matters now, since you're assuming that it was for him that the Attorney General wanted that report."

"Not assuming. I know it was." He slued around, putting a knee on the seat, to face the rear. "Mr Wolfe, I'm an officer of the law. I have been told by a superior officer of the law that you have come to invest-er, to inquire into the Harvey Greve case, and he requested me-I'll call it 'requested'-to extend to you every possible courtesy. I try to-"

"Didn't he say 'cooperate'?"

"He may have. I try to show courtesy, in my official capacity as well as personally, to any and all of my fellow citizens, but my primary obligation is to the people of this county who chose me to serve them. I'll be frank with you. This is the first time I have received such a request from the Attorney General. I don't want to refuse it or ignore it unless I have to. I ask you to be frank with me. I want you to tell me what kind of pressure you brought to bear on Mr Veale to persuade him to take that action."