Rex Stout - Death of a Dude

At table on the terrace Lily always sat facing the creek, which was only a dozen steps from the terrace edge, with Wade Worthy on her left and me on her right and Diana Kadany across from her. As she picked up her knife Diana said, "I had an awful thought today. Utterly awful."

Of course that was a cue. It was Wade Worthy who obliged her by taking it. I hadn't fully decided about Wade. His full-cheeked face, with a broad nose and a square chin, had an assortment of grins, and they were hard to sort out. The friendly grin looked friendly, but with it he might say something sour, and with the grin that looked sarcastic he might say something nice. The one he gave Diana now was neither of those, just polite. With it he said, "You're not a good judge of your own thoughts, no one is. Tell us and we'll vote on it."

"If I wasn't going to tell you," Diana said, "I wouldn't have mentioned it." She forked a bite of meat to her mouth and started to chew. She often did that; she might get a part in a play with an eating scene, and mixing chewing and talking needed practice. An actor can practice anywhere any time with anybody, and most of them do. "It was this," she said. "If that man hadn't been murdered, Archie wouldn't be here. He would have left three days ago. So the murderer did us a favour. You won't have to vote on that. That's an awful thought."

"We'll thank him when we know who he is," Lily said.

Diana swallowed daintily and took a bite of potato. "It's no joke, Lily. It was an awful thought, but it gave me an idea for a play. Someone could write a play about a woman who does awful things-you know, she lies, she steals, she cheats, she takes other women's husbands, she might even murder somebody. But the play would show that every time she hurts someone it helps a lot of other people. She makes some people suffer awful agonies, but she gives ten times as many people some kind of benefit. She does lots more good than she does harm. I haven't decided what the last scene would be, that would be up to whoever writes the play, but it could be a wonderful scene, utterly wonderful. Any actress would love it. I know I would."

The bite of potato was gone and another bite of meat was being chewed. She was really pretty good at it, but she had the advantage of a very attractive face. A girl with a good face has to be really messy to make you want to look somewhere else when she talks while she eats. Diana looked at Worthy and said, "You're a writer, Wade. Why couldn't you do it?"

He shook his head. "Not that kind of writer. Suggest it to Albee or Tennessee Williams. As for the murderer doing us a favour, it wasn't much of one. We've seen darned little of Archie this week." He looked at me, the friendly grin. "How's it going?"

"Fine." I swallowed food. "All I need now is a confession. Diana was there picking berries on the best and biggest bush, and he came and pushed her away and she shot him. Luckily-"

"What with?" Diana demanded.

"Don't interrupt. Luckily Wade came along with a gun, out after gophers, and he shot him first but only in the shoulder, and you asked him to let you try and he handed you the gun."

Wade pointed his knife at me. "We're not going to confess. You'll have to prove it."

"Okay. Do you know about personal congenital radiation?"

"No."

"That the personal congenital radiation of no two people is the same, like finger-prints?"

"It sounds reasonable."

"It's not only reasonable, it's scientific. It's a wonder any detective ever detected anything without modern science. I went to Blue Grouse Ridge today with a new Geiger counter, eight cents off the regular price, and it gave me Diana and you. You had both been there. All I need now-"

"Certainly we were there," Diana said with her mouth full. "You and Lily took us there! Three or four times!"

"Prove it," Lily said. "I don't remember."

"Lily! You do! You must!"

One of the difficulties about Diana was that you were never absolutely sure whether she was playing dumb or was dumb.

By the time we got to sherbet and coffee the evening had been discussed and settled. Evenings could be pinochle, reading books or magazines or newspapers, television, conversation, or private concerns in our rooms, or sometimes, especially Saturdays, contacts with natives. For that evening Wade suggested pinochle, but I said it would have to be three-handed because I was going to Lame Horse. They considered going along and decided not to, and after doing my share of table-clearing I went out and started the car.

Now I have a problem. If I report fully what I did the next four days and nights, from eight p.m. Saturday to eight p.m. Wednesday, you will meet dozens of people and be better acquainted with Monroe County, Montana, but you will not have gained an inch on the man or woman who shot Philip Brodell, because I didn't; and you may get fed up, as I almost did. I'll settle for one sample if you will, and the sample might as well be that Saturday evening.

Since most of the Saturday-night crowd at Lame Horse came in cars and it was only twenty-four miles to Timberburg, you might suppose they would go on to the county seat, where there was a movie house with plush seats and a bowling alley and other chances to frolic, but no. Just the opposite; Saturday night quite a few people who lived in Timberburg, as many as a hundred or more, came to Lame Horse. The attraction was a big old ramshackle frame building next to Vawter's General Store which had a sign twenty feet long at the edge of the roof, reading:

WOODROW STEPANIAN HALL OF

CULTURE

That was the hall, usually called Woody's. Woody, now in his sixties, had built it some thirty years ago with money left him by his father, who had peddled anything you care to name all over that part of the state even before it was a state. All of Woody's young years had been spent in a traveling department store. At birth he had been named Theodore, for Roosevelt, but when he was ten years old his father had changed it to Woodrow, for Wilson. In 1942 Woody had considered changing it to Franklin, for another Roosevelt, but had decided there would be too many complications, including changing the sign.

First on the Saturday-night program at the hall was a movie, which started at eight o'clock and which I didn't really need, so after parking the car down the road I went to Vawter's. Inside the high-ceilinged room a hundred feet long and nearly as wide, it was obvious why I wouldn't have had to go to Timberburg except for mailing the letter and consulting Who's Who. A complete inventory would take several pages, so I mention only a few items such as frying pans, ten-gallon hats, five-gallon coffee pots, fishing tackle, magazines and paperbacks, guns and ammunition, groceries of all kinds, ponchos, spurs and saddles, cigars and cigarettes and tobacco, nuts and candies, hunting knives and kitchen knives, cowboy boots and rubber waders, men's wear and women's wear, a tableload of Levi's, picture postcards, ballpoint pens, three shelves of drugs…

A dozen or so customers were scattered around, and Mort Vawter, his wife, Mabel, and his son Johnny were busy with them. I hadn't come to buy, or even to talk, but to listen, and after a look around I decided that the best prospect was a leather-skinned woman with stringy black hair who was inspecting a display of shoes on a counter. She was Henrietta, a halfbreed bootlegger who lived down the road, and she knew everybody. I moseyed over and said, "Hi, Henrietta. I bet you don't remember me."