Rex Stout - Death of a Dude

My favourite spot on earth is only a seven-minute walk from where I live, Nero Wolfe's house on West 35th Street: Herald Square, where you can see more different kinds of people in ten minutes than anywhere else I know of. One day I saw the top cock of the Mafia step back to let a Sunday-school teacher from Iowa go first through the revolving door of the world's largest department store. If you ask how I knew who they were, I didn't, but that's what they looked like. But for anyone who is fed up with people and noise, the favourite spot could be Lily Rowan's cabin clearing. I admit there is a little noise, Berry Creek making a fuss about the rocks that won't move, but after a couple of days you hear it only when you want to. The big firs start farther up, but there are plenty of trees right there, mostly lodgepole pine, and downstream is Beaver Meadow; and just upstream, where the creek swings around again to the north, is a cliff of solid rock you can't see the top of from this side of the creek. If you need exercise and want to throw stones at gophers it's only a three-minute walk down the lane to the road.

The cabin is logs of course, and is all on one level. Crossing a stone-paved terrace with a roof, you enter a room 34 by 52, with a 10-foot fireplace at the rear, and for living that's it. For privacy or sleeping, there are two doors at the right, one to Lily's room and the other to a guest room. A door at the left leads to a long hall, and when you take it, first comes a big kitchen, then Mimi's room, then a big storeroom, and then three guest rooms. There are six baths, complete with tubs and showers. A very nice little cabin. Except for the beds, the furniture you sit on is nearly all wicker. The rugs in all rooms are Red Indian, and on the walls, instead of pictures, are Indian blankets and rugs. Three of them in the big room are genuine bayetas. There is just one picture on view anywhere, a framed photograph of Lily's father and mother on the piano-one of the few things she carts back and forth from New York.

Some of the items Lily had got at Timberburg that morning were for the kitchen and storeroom, and with them we saved steps by skirting the terrace to a door direct to the hall. There was no offer of help from the dark-eyed beauty with a pointed chin who was on a chair in the sun off the edge of the terrace. Since her halter and shorts didn't total more than three square feet, there was a lot of smooth tan skin showing, with her bare legs out straight to the foot extension. She had greeted us with a graceful wave as we got out of the car. Back from the deliveries to the kitchen and storeroom, Lily took the few things that were left, and I backed the car into a space among the lodgepoles and got my paper bag. Lily had stopped by Diana's chair to give her one of the packages.

Her name was Diana Kadany. A house guest at Lily's cabin might be anyone from a tired-out social worker to a famous composer of the kind of music I can get along without. That year there were three, counting me, which was par. Discussing Diana Kadany one day when we were up at the second pool getting trout for supper, I had guessed she was twenty-two and Lily had guessed twenty-five. She had made a sort of a hit the previous winter in an off-Broadway play entitled Not Me You Don't, the kind of play that would go fine with music by that famous composer I mentioned, and she had been invited to Montana only because Lily, having helped stake the play, was curious about her. Of course that was risky, taking on a question mark for a month, but it hadn't been too bad. It was only a minor nuisance that she practiced being seductive with any male who happened to be handy. Of course Wade Worthy and I were the handiest.

As I crossed the big room to the door to my room, the one at the far right, Wade Worthy was at the table in the corner, banging away on the Underwood. He was the other guest, but a special kind of guest. He was doing a job. For two years Lily had collected material about her father, and when there was about half a ton of it she had started looking for someone to write the book, thinking that with the help of a friend of hers who was an editor at the Parthenon Press it might take a week. It had taken nearly three months. Of the first twenty-two professional authors considered, three were busy writing books, four were getting ready to, two were in hospitals, one was too mad about Vietnam to talk about anything else, three were out of the country, one was experimenting with LSD, two were Republicans and wouldn't write the kind of book Lily had in mind about a Tammany Hall man who had made a pile building sewers and laying pavements, one wanted a year to decide, three said they weren't interested without giving a reason, one was trying to make up his mind whether to switch to fiction, and one was drunk.

Finally, in May, Lily and the editor had tagged Wade Worthy. According to the editor, no one in the literary world had ever heard of him until three years ago, when his biography of Abbott Lawrence Lowell had been published. It had done only fairly well, but his second book, about Heywood Broun, with the title The Head and the Heart, had nearly made the best-seller list. Lily's offer of a fat advance, with only half to be deducted from royalties-which the editor strongly disapproved-had appealed to him, and there he was at the typewriter, working on the outline. The title was to be A Stripe of the Tiger: the Life and Work of James Gilmore Rowan. Lily was hoping as many copies of it would be sold as there were steers branded Bar JR. The JR stood for James Rowan.

In my room I emptied the bag, put the belt around my middle, the toothpaste in the bathroom, and the notebook and magnifying glass in my pockets, went out again with the other three items, and detoured to the corner in the big room to give Wade Worthy the typewriter ribbon. Outside, Lily was still with Diana Kadany. I told her I'd take the car because I might go on to Lame Horse or Farnham's, and she told me not to be late for supper. I got in the car, rolled down the lane to the road, turned left and left again in a sixth of a mile at the turnoff, crossed the bridge over Berry Creek, went through an open gate which was usually shut, passed corrals and two barns and a bunkhouse-which Pete Ingalls called the dorm-and stopped at the edge of a big square of dusty gravel with a tree in the middle, in front of Harvey Greve's house.

Chapter 2

I could tell you a lot about the Bar JR Ranch-how many acres, how many head, the trial and error with alfalfa that had been mostly error, the fence problem, the bookkeeping complications, the open-range question, and so on-but that has nothing to do with a dead dude and how to get Harvey back where he belonged. Irrelevant and immaterial. But the person who appeared inside the screen door as I got out of the car was relevant. As I approached she opened the door and I went in.

I have never met a nineteen-year-old boy who gave me the impression that he knew things I wouldn't understand, but three girls around that age have, and little Alma Greve was one of them. Don't ask me if it was the deep-set brown eyes that seldom opened wide, or the curve of her lips that seemed to be starting a smile but never made it, or what, because I don't know. When I had mentioned it to Lily a couple of years back she had said, "Oh, come on. It's not her, it's you. Every pretty girl a man sees, either she's a mystery he could learn from, or she's an innocent he could-uh-edify. Either way, he's always wrong. Of course with you she's seldom a mystery because what don't you understand?"

I had grabbed a clump of paintbrush and thrown it at her.

I asked Alma who was around, and she said her mother was taking a nap and the baby was asleep. She asked me if her mother had asked me to get fly swatters, and I said no, they were for Pete.