Death of a Dude

Chapter 3

If the way I spent the next three hours seems not very brilliant, I haven’t made it clear enough how tough the situation was. I went to have a look at the scene of the crime.

The road from Lame Horse to the turnoffs to the Bar JR Ranch and Lily’s cabin doesn’t stop there. It keeps going for three more miles and stops for good at the Fishtail River, and there, on the right, is Bill Farnham’s dude ranch. It’s small compared with some, and deluxe compared with almost any — not counting Lily’s cabin. Farnham’s limit is six dudes at a time, and a few days before Brodell was killed a guy from Spokane had broken an arm and gone home, so now there were only four — Dr. and Mrs. Amory and the pair from Denver. There was no Mrs. Farnham, and for help there was a female cook, a girl who did the house chores, and two wranglers named Bert Magee and Sam Peacock. There were no dude cabins and only one building of any size, a combo of log and frame with ells in the middle and at the ends, taking about half an acre. The barn and corrals were away from the river, beyond a stand of jack pine.

When I stopped the car between a couple of big firs and got out there was no one in sight, and around at the river side of the house, where there were chairs and tables on a carpet of needles, still no one; but when I crossed to the screen door and sang out, “Anybody home?” a voice told me to come in and I entered. The room was about half the size of the big room in Lily’s cabin, and on a rug in the middle of it a woman with red hair was stretched out on her back with her head propped on a stack of cushions. As I approached she tossed a magazine aside, said, “I recognized your voice,” and patted her mouth for a yawn.

I stopped a polite four paces short and said I hoped I hadn’t disturbed a nap. She said no, she did her sleeping at night, and added, “Don’t mind it, please, I’m too lazy to pull down my skirt. I hate pants.” She patted a yawn. “If you didn’t come to see me you’re out of luck. They all left at dawn to ford the river and ride up the mountain to try to see some elk, and there’s no telling when they’ll get back. Are you still — uh, well — trying to get your friend out of jail?”

“Just for something to do. Shall I pull the skirt down?”

“Don’t bother. If you came to see me I can’t imagine what for, but here I am.”

I smiled down at her to show I appreciated the chitchat. “Actually, Mrs. Amory, I didn’t come to see anyone. I only wanted to tell Bill that I’m leaving the car here to go for a look at Blue Grouse Ridge. If he comes before I do, tell him, will you?”

“Of course, but he won’t.” She brushed a strand of the red hair back from her temple. “That’s where it happened, isn’t it?”

I said yes and turned to go, but turned back to her voice. “I guess you know I’m the only one here that’s rooting for you. They all think he — I forget his name—”

“Greve. Harvey Greve.”

She nodded. “They all think he did it. I know an intelligent man when I see one, and I think you’re one, and I bet you know what you’re doing. Good luck.”

I thanked her and went.

I knew Blue Grouse Ridge because it was the best place around for huckleberries, and Lily and I had been there often — sometimes for berries and sometimes for young blue grouse which, about ten weeks old and grubbed almost exclusively on berries, were as good eating as anything Fritz had ever served. Of course it was against the law to take them, so of course we didn’t overdo it. We had gone to the ridge, for berries, not blue grouse, just two days before Brodell was killed, with Diana Kadany and Wade Worthy.

I could have got there cross-country from the Bar JR or the cabin, but it was twice as far and rough going part of the way. From Farnham’s it was only a mile or so with no hard climbing. Beyond the barn and corrals there was a close stand of firs on a down slope with no windfalls, and thick soft duff underfoot, then a rocky stretch I had to zigzag through, and then a big field of bear grass up the slope of the ridge. The bear grass, dry and tough in August, slowed me down, trying to tangle my legs. When I was through it, fifty yards or so short of the crest, I turned left and went parallel with the ridge, looking for signs — trampling of feet or brush cleared, anything. I am no mountain tracker, but certainly there would be something that would show even a dude where enough men had come to pack out a two-legged carcass. But the first sign that placed it for me was one that could have been anywhere on earth, as good on Herald Square as on Blue Grouse Ridge — blood. There was a blotch of it, or what had been left of it by the tongue of some animal, on the surface of a boulder, and a narrow ribbon of it down the boulder to the lower edge. At the upper edge of the boulder there was a big clump of berry bushes, so he had been standing there picking berries when the bullet came from behind.

Having seen the blood first, I then saw a lot of other signs which a native would probably have seen first: twigs and branches of bushes, including huckleberries, twisted and broken, rocks that had recently been moved, paintbrush trampled, and so on. Feet and hands had been busy all around, even up above the boulder, and that must have been in a search for the bullets. Having detected that, I turned to face downhill to consider the detail that I was most interested in, cover for the approach. There was nothing much within a hundred feet but berry bushes and boulders, with a scattering of paintbrush and other small stuff, but beyond there was higher growth and trees. It would have been a cinch for even a New York character like me to get within forty yards of the target, let alone a man who knew how to stalk deer and elk. But forty yards is too far to count on a hand gun, so it had been a rifle, and in the middle of a Montana summer nobody goes out with a rifle for anything with four legs, except maybe a coyote, and you don’t climb Blue Grouse Ridge for a coyote.

I picked a handful of berries and went and sat on a rock. I may as well admit it, I had been ass enough to hope that a look at the scene would give me a notion of some kind that would open a crack. It hadn’t and it wouldn’t. This wasn’t my world, and if in that jumble of outdoor stuff there was some hint of who had sneaked up on Philip Brodell and plugged him, it wasn’t for me. Three hours wasted. When a chipmunk showed and darted into a clump, I picked up a pebble the size of a golf ball, and when he skipped out I threw it at him, and of course missed. And at the cabin some of my best friends were chipmunks. Pleased with nothing whatever, I headed downhill and made it back to Farnham’s and the car without breaking a leg. There was no one around. It was a little after five-thirty when I arrived at the cabin, and supper was at six.

The rule was to go to supper as you were, but sweat had dried on me, so I went to my room and rinsed off and changed to a PSI shirt and brown woolen slacks. As I was brushing my hair there was a tap on the door of the little hall between Lily’s room and mine and I went and opened it to her. She was still in the same green shirt and slacks, and when she saw I had changed she said, “Company coming?” and I told her where I had been, spotting the bloody boulder for her by saying it was about two hundred yards north of where she had once watched me pick a fool hen off a tree with one hand. Also I told her about my talks with Alma and Carol.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I’ve bought it. I have filed her. Her hand on a Bible might not have sold me, but her hand on that saddle did.”

Lily had puckered her lips. She unpuckered them and nodded. “All right, then that’s settled. I wanted to try that saddle on Cat once just to see how it sat, and she wouldn’t let me. You were right. If she had shot him she would have told you. But don’t get the idea that you’re a better judge of women than I am.”

Not meaning that she had wanted to try the saddle on a bobcat or mountain lion. She had named her pinto mare Cat because of the way she had jumped a ditch the first day she rode her, three years ago.

We ate breakfast and lunch in the kitchen, on a table by the big window, and sometimes supper too, but usually the place for supper was the screened terrace on the creek side. It was more trouble because Lily brought no one but Mimi from New York and wouldn’t have local help, and the table-waiting was done by us. That evening it was filets mignons, baked potatoes, spinach, and raspberry sherbet, and everything but the potatoes had come from the king-size walk-in deep freeze in the storeroom. The filets mignons had been shipped by express from Chicago, packed in dry ice. You might suppose that with all of the thousands of tons of beef on the hoof just across the creek, Lily’s property, there was a better and cheaper way, but that had been tried and found wanting.

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 favor. 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 favor, 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 fingerprints?”

“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:

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.”

She moved her head a little sideways to give her black eyes a slant at me, as cautious people often do. “What you bet?”

“Oh, a buck.”

“Huh. Miss Rowan’s man. Mr. Archie Goodwin.” She put a hand out palm up. “One buck.”

“Huh yourself. You may not mean what you could mean, so I’ll skip it.” I had my wallet out. “It’s a pleasant surprise seeing you here.” I handed her a bill. “I would have thought you’d be busy with customers Saturday evening.”

She turned the bill over to see the other side. “Trick?” She grunted and spread her fingers, and the bill fluttered to the floor. “New trick.”

“No trick.” I picked up the finif and offered it. “One buck of this is the bet. The rest is for your time answering a couple of questions I want to ask.”

“I don’t like questions.”

“Not about you. As you know, my friend Harvey Greve is in trouble.”

She grunted. “Bad trouble.”

“Very bad. You may also know I’m trying to help him.”

“Everybody knows.”

“Yeah. And everybody seems to think I can’t, because he killed that man. You see a lot of people and hear a lot of talk. Do they all think that?”

She pointed at the bill in my hand. “I answer and you pay? Four dollars?”

“I pay first. Take it and then answer.”

She took it, looked at both sides again, poked it in a pocket in her skirt, and said, “I don’t go to the court.”

“Of course not. This is just a friendly talk.”

“Many people say Mr. Greve killed him. Not all. Some people say you killed him.”

“How many?”

“Maybe three, maybe four. You know Emmy?”

I said yes. Emmy was Emmett Lake, who rode herd at the Bar JR and was known to be one of Henrietta’s best customers. “Don’t tell me he says I did it.”

“No. He say a man at Mr. Farnham’s.”

“I know he does, but he doesn’t say which one. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what you think.”

“Me think? Huh.”

I gave her a man-to-woman smile. “I bet you think plenty.”

“What you bet?”

“I couldn’t prove it. Look, Henrietta, as I said, you hear a lot of talk. He was here six weeks last year — the man who was killed. He told me he bought something from you.”

“One time. With Mr. Farnham.”

“Did he say anything about anybody?”

“I forget.”

“But you don’t forget what people have said about him this week, since he was killed. That’s my most important question. I don’t expect you to name anybody, only what anyone has said about him.” I got a sawbuck from my wallet and kept it visible. “It might help me help Mr. Greve. Tell me what you’ve heard about him.”

Her black eyes lowered to fix on the bill and raised again. “No,” she said.

And it stayed no, though I spent ten minutes trying to budge her. I returned the sawbuck to my wallet. It wouldn’t have done any good to double it or even make it a hundred; she wasn’t going to risk being asked questions in the court even if I swore on ten saddles that she wouldn’t have to. I left her and surveyed the field. Of the dozen or more people in view, I knew the names of all but three, but none of them was likely to spill any beans, and I went out and along to Woody’s.

The hall was even bigger than Vawter’s store outside, but inside it was partitioned into three sections, with the entrance at the middle section, which had shelves and counters with displays of cultural material, some of it for sale. There were phonograph records, paperbacks, reproductions of paintings and drawings, busts of great men, facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence, and a slew of miscellaneous items like the Bible in Armenian, most of them one-of-a-kind. Very few people ever bought anything there; Woody had told Lily that he took in about twenty dollars a week. His income came from the other two sections, where you had to pay to get in — the one at the left to see a movie and the one at the right to dance and mix, both Saturdays only.

When I entered, Woody was conversing with a quartet of dudes from some ranch upriver or downriver, three men and a woman, whom I had never seen before. I listened a while, looking at paperbacks, learning nothing. Woody claimed he never offered a book for sale unless he had read it, and I won’t call him a liar. His opinion of dudes in general was fully as low as that of most of his fellow Montanans, but he liked Lily so he accepted me, and he left the quartet to come and ask me if Miss Rowan was coming. I told him no, she was tired and going early to bed, and she had asked me to give him her regards.

He wasn’t as short as Alma Greve, but he too had to tilt his head back to me. His eyes were as black as Henrietta’s, and his mop of hair was as white as the top of Chair Mountain. “I bow to her,” he said. “I kiss her hand with deep respect. She is a doll. May I ask, have you made some progress?”

“No, Woody, I haven’t. Are you still with us?”

“I am. Forever and a day. If Mr. Greve shot that man like a coward I am a bow-legged coyote. I have told you I had the pleasure of meeting him when he was two years old. I was sixteen. His mother bought four blankets from my father that day and two dozen handkerchiefs. You have made no progress?”

“Not a smell. Have you?”

He shook his head, slow, his lips pursed. “I must confess I haven’t. Of course during the week I don’t see many people. Tonight there will be much talk and I’ll keep my ears open, and with some I can ask questions. You will stay?”

I said sure, that I had already asked questions of everybody who might have answers, but I would listen to the talk. A pair of dudes had entered and were approaching to speak with the famous Woody, and I went back to the paperbacks, picked one entitled The Greek Way, by Edith Hamilton, which I had heard mentioned by both Lily and Nero Wolfe, and went to a bench with it.

At 9:19 a man in a pink shirt, working Levi’s, cowboy boots, and a yellow neck rag, arrived, opened the door at the right, and set up his equipment, supplied by Woody, just outside the door — a till and a box of door checks on a little table. The gun at his belt was for looks only; Woody always checked it to make sure it wasn’t loaded. At 9:24 the musicians came — having met at Vawter’s probably, at Henrietta’s possibly — dressed fully as properly as the doorman, with a violin, an accordion, and a sax. Local talent. The piano, which Lily said was as good as hers, was on the platform inside. At 9:28 the first patrons showed, and at 9:33 the door at the left opened and the movie audience poured out, most of them across to the other door; and the fun started. The next four hours was what brought people of all ages from Timberburg, and both natives and dudes from as far away as Flat Bank. When the rush at the door had let up a little I paid my two bucks and went in. The band was playing “Horsey, Keep Your Tail Up,” and fifty couples were already on the floor, twisting and hopping. One of them was Woody and Flora Eaton, a big-boned widow out of luck who did the laundry and housework at the Bar JR. Many a dudine had tried to snare Woody for that first dance, but he always picked a native.

I said this is a sample, and I mustn’t drag it out. In those four hours at the hall I heard much and saw much, but left around one-thirty no wiser.

I heard a girl in a cherry-colored shirt call across to Sam Peacock, one of the two wranglers at Farnham’s, who came late, “Get a haircut, Sam, you look awful,” and his reply, “I ain’t so bad now. You should have seen me when I was a yearling, they had to tie my mother up before she’d let me suck.”

I saw Johnny Vawter and Woody bounce a couple of boiled dudes who were trying to take the accordion away from the musician. The hooch that had inspired them had been brought by them, which was customary. At the bar in a corner the only items available were fizz-water, ice, paper cups, soft stuff, and aspirin.

I heard more beats and off-beats, and saw more steps and off-steps, than I had heard and seen at all the New York spots I was acquainted with.

I heard a middle-aged woman with ample apples yell at a man about the same age, “Like hell they’re milk-fake!” and saw her slap him hard enough to bend him.

I heard a dude in a dinner jacket tell a woman in a dress nearly to her ankles, “A sheet-snapper is not a prostitute. It’s a girl or a woman who makes beds.” I heard Gil Haight say to another kid, “Of course she’s not here. She’s got a baby to look after.” I saw about eight dozen people, all kinds and sizes, look the other way, or stop talking, or give me the fish-eye, when I came near.

So back at the cabin, in bed under two blankets for the cold of the night, there was nothing for my mind to work on and it turned me loose for sleep.

That’s the sample, but before skipping to Wednesday evening I must report an incident that occurred at the cabin late Tuesday afternoon. I had just got back from somewhere and was with Lily on what we called the morning terrace, the other one being the creek terrace, when a car came up the lane — a Dodge Coronet hardtop I had seen before — with two men in the front seat, and Lily said, “There they are. I was just going to tell you, Dawson phoned they wanted to see me. He didn’t say why.”

The car was there, at the edge of the lodgepoles, and Luther Dawson and Thomas R. Jessup were getting out. Seeing those two, I was so impressed that I didn’t remember my manners and leave my chair until they were nearly to us. The defense counsel and the county attorney coming together to see the owner of the ranch Harvey Greve ran had to mean that something had busted wide open, and when I did get up I had to control my face to keep it from beaming. Their faces were not beaming as they exchanged greetings with us and took the chairs I moved up for them, but of course the county attorney’s wouldn’t be if something had happened that was messing up a murder case for him. Lily said their throats were probably dry and dusty after their drive and asked what they would like to drink, but they declined with thanks.

“It may strike you as a little irregular, our coming together,” Dawson said, “but Mr. Jessup wanted to ask you something and we agreed that it would be more in order for me to do the asking, in his presence.”

Lily nodded. “Of course. Law and order.”

Dawson looked at Jessup. They were both Montana-born-and-bred, but one looked it and the other didn’t. Dawson, around sixty, in a striped blue-and-green shirt with rolled-up sleeves, no tie, and khaki pants, was big and brawny and leathery, while the county attorney, some twenty years younger, was slim and trim in a dark gray suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. Dawson looked at me, opened his mouth, shut it again, and looked at Lily. “Of course you’re not my client,” he said. “Mr. Greve is my client. But you paid my retainer and have said you will meet the costs of his defense. So I’ll just ask you, have you consulted — er, approached — anyone else about the case?”

Lily’s eyes widened a little. “Of course I have.”

“Who?”

“Well... Archie Goodwin. Mrs. Harvey Greve. Melvin Fox. Woodrow Stepanian. Peter Ingalls. Emmett Lake. Mimi Deffand. Mort—”

“Excuse me for interrupting. My question should have been more specific. Have you consulted anyone other than local people? Anyone in Helena?”

If she had been any ordinary woman I would have horned in, but with Lily I didn’t think it was necessary. It wasn’t. “Really, Mr. Dawson,” she said, “how old are you? How many hostile witnesses would you say you have cross-examined?”

He stared at her.

“I suppose,” she said, “that lawyers have as much right to bad habits as other people, but other people don’t have to like them.” She turned to me. “What about it, Archie? Is it any of his business whom I have or haven’t consulted?”

“No,” I said, “but that’s not the point. From what he said, the question is actually being asked by Jessup, through him. It certainly is none of Jessup’s business, and they both have a hell of a nerve. I don’t know about Montana, but in New York if a prosecuting attorney asked the person who was paying the defense counsel who she had consulted, the Bar Association would like to know about it. Since you asked my opinion, if I were you I would tell both of them to go climb a tree.”

She looked at one and then the other, and said, “Go climb a tree.”

Dawson said to me, “You have completely misrepresented the situation, Mr. Goodwin.”

I eyed him. “Look, Mr. Dawson. I don’t wonder that you fumbled it; as you said, it’s a little irregular. If you hadn’t been fussed you would probably have handled it fine. Obviously something has happened that made Jessup think someone has been persuaded to butt in on his case, and he suspects that Miss Rowan did the persuading, and he wants to know, and so do you. Also obviously the way to handle it would have been to tell her what has happened and ask her if she had a hand in it, and it wouldn’t hurt to say please. If you don’t want to do it that way I guess you’ll have to look around for a tree.”

Dawson looked at the county attorney. Jessup said, “It would have to be understood that it’s strictly confidential.”

Dawson nodded. Lily said, “If you mean we have to promise not to tell anybody, nothing doing. We wouldn’t broadcast it just for fun, but no promises.”

Dawson turned to Jessup and asked, “Well, Tom?”

Jessup said, “I’d like to confer,” rose, and said to Lily, “Will you excuse us briefly, Miss Rowan?”

Lily nodded, and for the conference they walked over to the hardtop and behind it, and Lily asked me if I had a guess. I held up crossed fingers and said one would get her two that there was going to be some kind of a break, but as to what kind and how much, her guess was as good as mine. I no longer had to control my face to keep it from beaming.

The conference didn’t take long. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Dawson had come back alone just to say he was sorry we had been bothered, but in a few minutes they both came and took their chairs, and Dawson said, “The decision was Mr. Jessup’s, not mine. I want to make it clear that I am here at all only because he thought it proper, and I agreed.” He focused on Lily. “If you won’t promise, Miss Rowan, you won’t, and I merely want to say that I join him in hoping that you and Mr. Goodwin will regard what he tells you as a confidence. If I told you, it would be hearsay, so he will.”

In the last five days I had tried three times to get to Thomas R. Jessup for a private talk, and got stiff-armed. I’m not complaining, just reporting. There’s no law requiring a prosecuting attorney to talk it over with any and all friends of the defendant. It was Morley Haight, the sheriff, who had questioned me as a possible suspect or material witness. I had seen Jessup only from a distance and was appreciating the chance to size him up.

He gave Lily a politician’s smile and said, “I’m sorry there was a misunderstanding, Miss Rowan. Mr. Goodwin said it wouldn’t hurt to say please, and I do say please. Please consider this a confidential communication. I confidently leave that to your discretion. Mr. Goodwin said we should tell you what happened, and I’m going to. It won’t take long. Early this morning I had a phone call from a state official in Helena — a high official. He asked me to come to his office at my earliest convenience and bring my files on the Harvey Greve case. I drove to Helena and was with him nearly three hours. He wanted a complete detailed report, and after I dictated it to his secretary he asked questions, many questions.”

He turned on the politician’s smile again, for Lily, then for me, and back to her. “Now that was extraordinary. As far as I know, unprecedented, for the attor — for that state official to urgently summon a county attorney to Helena to report in detail on a case he is preparing. And a murder case. Of course I asked him what had caused such sudden and urgent interest, but I got no satisfaction. When I left his office I had absolutely no idea of the reason for it; I couldn’t even guess. I was twenty miles or more on my way back to Timberburg before it occurred to me that you might possibly have — er — intervened. You are concerned about Harvey Greve — properly, quite properly. You have retained Luther Dawson, an eminent member of the Montana bar, in his behalf. I know nothing of any political connections you may have, but a woman of your standing and wealth and background must be — must know many important people. So I turned around and drove back to Helena and went to see Mr. Dawson and described the situation to him. He said he knew nothing of any approach to the — to that official, and after some discussion he agreed that it would be reasonable to ask you about it, and he phoned you. I am not suggesting that you may have acted improperly, not at all. But if a high state official is going to — er — interfere with my handling of an important case, I have a right to know why, and naturally I want to know, and naturally Mr. Dawson does too, as counsel for the defense.” The smile again. “Of course if what I have said was confidential, anything you say will be confidential too.”

If they had known Lily as well as I did they would have known that the little circular movement of the toe of her shoe meant that she was good and sore. Also one of her eyes, the left, was slightly narrower than the other, which was even worse. “You’re asking me,” she said, “if I have pulled some strings with someone in Helena.”

“Well... I wouldn’t put it in those terms.”

“I would and do. What I say isn’t confidential, Mr. Jessup. I am suggesting that you have acted improperly. You’re on the other side. Why should you ask me anything at all or expect me to tell you anything? If you’ll go and sit in the car, Mr. Dawson will come in a minute.”

“I assure you, Miss Rowan—”

“Damn it, do you want Mr. Goodwin to drag you?” She stood up, presumably to help me drag.

Jessup looked at me, then at Dawson. Dawson shook his head. Jessup, not smiling, got up and went, dignified, in no hurry. When he was in the car, some twenty paces away, Lily turned to the counsel for the defense. “I don’t know if you’ve acted improperly or not, Mr. Dawson, and I don’t care. Even if it was proper I don’t like it, but I’ll relieve your mind so you can use it for representing your clients, including Harvey Greve. I have approached or consulted no one ‘other than local people,’ no one in Helena or anywhere else, and I have no idea why a state official is interested in the case. Have you, Archie?”

“No.”

“Then that’s settled. Let’s go get a drink.” She headed for the cabin door, and I followed.

Inside, she went left, to the door to the long hall, but I stayed in the big room long enough to see Dawson join Jessup in the car and take the wheel. When the car had disappeared around a bend in the lane I proceeded to the hall and on to the kitchen. Lily was putting ice cubes in a pitcher, and Mimi was at the center table, slicing tomatoes brought by me from Vawter’s.

“I’m trying to remember,” Lily said, “if I was ever as mad as I am now.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “More than once.” I got out my wallet and produced two singles and offered them. “You win, damn it.”

“Win what?”

Mimi’s round blue eyes, which fitted her round face, which fitted all her other roundness, darted a glance at the bills and returned to the tomatoes. We talked as freely in her presence as Wolfe and I did in Fritz’s. “I said,” I told Lily, “that one would get you two that there was going to be some kind of a break. Here’s the two. There will be no break.”

“But I didn’t take the bet. How do you know? If a high state official is interested—”

“Yeah, the Attorney General.” I stuck the bills in a pocket and brought gin and vermouth from a shelf. “He almost said it once. Haven’t you guessed who that report was for?”

“No.” She cocked her head at me. “So you have approached somebody.”

“No, not me. But one will get you ten that I know who did. I’m a detective, I figure things. I mailed that letter Saturday. He got it yesterday morning, and when he went up to the orchids he was harder for Theodore to take than usual. His appetite was off at lunch. Actually I am not absolutely essential to his convenience and comfort and welfare, nobody is, but he comes close to thinking I am. My letter left it wide open when he could expect me back — a week, a month, two months, no telling — and he hates uncertainty.”

“So he phoned the Attorney General of Montana and demanded a complete detailed report pronto.”

“No, but he phoned somebody.” The ingredients were in and I started stirring. “There are a lot of people who are grateful for something he did, even after paying the bill, and a few of them are the kind who might phone a governor or even a president, let alone an attorney general. He phoned one of them, maybe more than one, and he phoned Helena. It wasn’t any great favor to ask, just a report. The gist of it will probably be that the evidence against Harvey is all wool, from Montana sheep and two yards wide. If by phone he may have it already, and his appetite for dinner will be even worse.” I looked at my wrist. “He’s at the table now. It’s seven-thirty-two in New York.”

I put the glass rod down, picked up the pitcher, and poured. As she picked up her glass she said, “I admit that’s good guessing, but you’re not sure. Anyway I’m not. There could be a break.” She raised the glass high. “To Harvey.”

“One will get you ten. To Harvey.”

If she had taken my ten-to-one offer, whether I had made a bad bet or not would have depended on whether what happened twenty-six hours later, around eight o’clock Wednesday evening, should be regarded as a break, and that would have depended on who did the regarding. I had spent the day scouting around making useless motions, trying to find a stone with something under it, and it was getting me down. At the supper table I had certainly contributed nothing to help to make it a jolly meal, and when the coffee was finished I had said I had a letter to write and gone to my room. I did want to write something, but not a letter. I was going to do something desperate, something I had never done before: write down every damned fact I had collected in ten days, at least every fact that could conceivably mean anything, and try to find connections or contradictions that would point somewhere. I was at the table by an open window, with a pad and a supply of pencils, considering where to start, when I heard a car coming up the lane. I couldn’t see it because my room was on the creek side. The others were closer than I was, and the fact that I jumped up instantly and scooted to the big room showed what shape I was in. Pitiful. Diana was at the piano and Lily was at the screen door looking out, and I joined her. The car was there, a taxi from Timberburg. It would soon be dusk, and there was light enough to see the man at the wheel stick his head out of the window and call, “Is this Lily Rowan’s place?”

I opened the door and stepped out and said yes, and the rear door of the taxi opened and a man climbed out, backwards. His big broad behind was Nero Wolfe’s, and when he straightened up and turned around, so was his big broad front. Lily, at my elbow, said, “The mountain comes to Mohammed,” and we crossed the terrace to meet him.