Rex Stout - Death of a Dude

"Then perhaps you should be suspected."

"Yeah, go ahead. The sheriff did a little."

"Why did he stop?"

"Because Harvey was just as good as me or better, and he's got it in for Harvey. And Harvey was out alone that afternoon, and I wasn't. Emmett Lake was with me right through, and Pete Ingalls too part of the time. The sheriff knew Emmett wouldn't lie for me because he thinks he ought to have my job."

"Balls," Emmett said.

He was ignored. Wolfe asked Mel, "You knew Brodell was back?"

"Yeah, we all did. We heard about it, Pete did and told us, the day after he came, a Tuesday. After supper that night the three of us had a big argument. Pete said we ought to offer to help Harvey and Carol keep an eye on Alma day and night to keep her from seeing him again, and Emmett said we ought to lay off because he might marry her, and I said it was up to her father and mother and we had to just leave it to them unless they asked us. Like every argument I ever had a part of, nobody changed anybody. But Harvey didn't say anything in the morning and neither did Carol, and it was a working day for all of us, and after supper Pete went off somewhere, and Emmett had a bellyache and went to bed. I told Archie all this."

"I know you did. The argument was resumed Wednesday evening?"

"Some. We had calmed down a little and we didn't work up a sweat. Thursday too, we had calmed down even more. Harvey had told me that Carol was sure that Alma hadn't seen him and wasn't going to. But like I told Archie, Pete and I were talking about him Thursday after supper, out by the big corral, right at the time he was laying on that boulder with two holes through him. It showed me once more, when I heard about it Friday, that you don't always know what you're talking about."

"How could you? Not only ignorance. Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious effort to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try. Please continue."

Mel shook his head. "There's nowhere to continue to. I know what you're aiming at, you want to make it that somebody else shot that Brodell, not Harvey. I'd like that as much as you and Archie would, but if you want to brand a calf that's hid in the brush, first you've got to find him and tie him. What about that Haight kid?"

"Mr Goodwin has eliminated him."

"No dice, Mel," I said. "I spent the morning on him, and he's absolutely out."

"Who's in?"

"Nobody. That's why we're here. Mr Wolfe thought you might have heard something about Brodell that would point."

"I've been too busy to hear anything much, with Harvey gone. I've been across the creek just once in these two weeks, to Timberburg to see Harvey, and Morley Haight wouldn't let me. By God, I wish you could brand him."

Wolfe's eyes had gone right. "Mr Lake. Tell me about Mr Brodell."

"Dang Brodell," Emmett said.

Actually that isn't what he said. But about a year ago I got a four-page letter from a woman in Wichita, Kansas, saying that she had read all of my reports and that as each of her fourteen grandchildren reached his or her twelfth birthday she gave him or her copies of three of them just to get them started. If I go ahead and report what Emmett Lake actually said I would almost certainly lose that nice old lady, and what about the grandchildren who aren't twelve yet? I don't like censorship any better than you do, and if the payoff was going to be that it was Emmett who shot Brodell, I would have to report him straight and kiss Wichita good-by. But he just happened to be around because it was a ranch and he was a cowhand, so I'll edit him. Those of you who like the kind of words he liked can stick them in yourselves, and don't skimp.

"Dang [AG] Brodell," he didn't say.

"It can't be done," Pete Ingalls said. "He's dead and buried."

"It was me that said the atrocious [AG] scourge [AG] might marry her, and that shows what a misguided [AG] ignoramus [AG] I was."

"I thought you were showing understanding and compassion," Pete said.

"Balls. I said how I figured it. You know what I said. You're a lot younger than I am and you're bigger and stronger, but if I sit here and cross my legs good, let's see you get them opened up. Every breathing [AG] female [AG] alive is a born siren [AG]. The reason I called him an atrocious [AG] scourge [AG] was because he didn't belong here and all the panting [AG] dudes can thumping [AG] well leave their outstanding [AG] bats [AG] at home when they…"

Oh piffle [AG], that's enough. Censorship is too much work. I couldn't leave him out because he was there, but that will have to do for him. Wolfe stood it a little longer-he can stand anything if there's any chance it will help-and then stopped him by saying in a tone that had stopped better men with better vocabularies, "Thank you, Mr Lake, for illustrating so well what I said about words. Mr Ingalls. You have demonstrated that you have a supply of words too, less colourful. Mr Goodwin has told me that you traded much more than twenty of them with Mr Brodell."

"Last year," Pete said. "I didn't see him this year. I presume Archie has told you I agree with him on Harvey, but I've got a better reason. Harvey won't kill a fellow creature unless he intends to eat it. He doesn't even take shots at coyotes. The first year I was here, a horse broke a leg and had to be shot, and Harvey couldn't do it, and Mel had to. Now a man with an established psychological pattern like that, he might kill a man on a sudden irresistible impulse, but to suppose he would deliberately take a rifle and go hunting for a man and gun him down, that's just ridiculous. I know enough about-"

"If you please." Wolfe's tone wasn't the one he had stopped Emmett with, but it served. "Mr Greve needs a liberator, not an advocate. You were with Mr Brodell frequently last summer?"

Pete turned both palms up. He had a wide assortment of gestures. "I wouldn't say with. It's not the same thing, being with a man and merely being where he is. He was impressed by me, he sought me out, because he knew my father is a successful businessman-he's in real estate-and I'm doing advanced work in paleontology, and Brodell wanted to know how I broke loose. That was his phrase, 'break loose.' He wanted to break loose from his father and his newspaper, and his father wouldn't let him."

"What did he want to do?"

"Nothing."

"Nonsense. Only a saint wants to do nothing."

Pete grinned. "Man, that's good. I like that. It's not true, but I like it. Who said it?"

"I did."

"But who said it first?"

"I seldom let another man speak for me, and when I do I name him."

"I'll look it up, and if I find it I'll send you a crow to eat. But I take it back about Brodell wanting to do nothing. I should have said his one strong push was negative. I think a lot of people are in that pinch; there's something they want not to do so intensely that they can't take time to consider what they do want to do. As for Brodell, I more or less avoided him. I mean, when he wanted to arrange a double date for us with a couple of girls in Timberburg I declined with thanks. Things like that. Actually I saw very little of him except Saturday nights at Woody's-once or twice I ran across him at Vawter's, or he ran across me-and once four of us spent an evening at a bowling alley in Timberburg. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but he was dull. A very dull man. I had a thought about him the day after he died: I doubt if he ever stirred anybody. He was thirty-five years old. It took him perhaps one minute to die, or even less, but he probably stirred more people, he caused more excitement, in that one minute of dying than in all his thirty-five years of living. That's a dismal thought either about life or about him. I figured it. There are eighteen million, three hundred and ninety-six thousand minutes in thirty-five years. You told us to talk about Philip Brodell and his death. Well, if I tried all day I couldn't say anything truer about him than that. That's a hell of an obituary."