Death of a Dude

Chapter 8

At twenty minutes past five, four of us were sharing the front room at the Greves’ house with the pictures and ribbons and medals — and the silver cup and the saddle. All men. Carol Greve and Flora Eaton, the widow out of luck, were in the kitchen preparing the real Montana trout deal, which was scheduled for six o’clock. Alma was somewhere with the baby. Wolfe and I had arrived at five, and Pete Ingalls and Emmett Lake had been there expecting us, but Mel Fox had been held up by something wrong with a horse and we were waiting for him. Emmett, an old cowhand in his forties who looked the part, had said only two words, “Sit here,” to me, but Pete had said a lot. From his build you would suppose his chief interest was in something that took plenty of muscle, but he was postgraduating in paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and this was his third summer at the Bar JR. Wolfe had asked him a question about the demonstrations at Berkeley, starting a run of remarks that would have carried us right up to suppertime if Mel Fox hadn’t stopped it by joining us. Mel said he was sorry to be late and shook hands with Wolfe. He moved a chair up near mine, yanked his Levi’s as he sat, a habit of his, looked at his hands, and said he hadn’t even washed up. He asked if he had missed something he ought to know.

Wolfe shook his head. “We waited for you. I have been here three days, Mr. Fox, and you may have wondered why I haven’t seen you sooner.”

“I guess I’ve been too busy to do much wondering.”

“I envy you. Wondering is about all I have done.” Wolfe sent his eyes right and left to take them in. “Mr. Goodwin has acquainted me with you gentlemen, and if he had included any reason to suspect that one of you shot Philip Brodell I wouldn’t have waited until now to speak with you. I am here in the forlorn hope that one of you knows something, unwittingly, that will supply a suggestion. To try to uncover it by asking you questions would take days. Instead, I ask you to talk. Mr. Fox, you first. Talk about Philip Brodell and his death.”

“I’m not a great talker.” Mel looked at me and back at Wolfe. “I’ve talked it out with Archie.”

“I know, but let me hear you. Let your tongue go.”

“Well.” Mel crossed his legs. “I never traded more than twenty words with Brodell. That was one day last summer. A Sunday morning, I was at Vawter’s getting some things, and he came over and said who he was and said he wanted to buy a rope to take home and it ought to be a used rope, and he wanted to know did I have one I would sell him. I told him I didn’t. I guess it wasn’t even twenty words. Maybe I saw him one or two other times but not to speak to, he was nothing to me. Of course he wasn’t around when it came out that he was the father of Alma’s baby. Then I couldn’t say he was nothing to me, because Alma — well, I pulled porky quills out of her leg when she was only five years old. There was a lot of talk about him then, but mostly I just listened because I didn’t have much to say except I’d like to skin him alive.”

“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 colorful. 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 his 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.”

“And surely not deserved,” Wolfe said. “He must have stirred Miss Greve. Unless you say, as Mr. Lake would, that she stirred him.”

“It’s a point.” Pete pursed his lips to consider it. “But it’s just semantics. ‘Stirred.’ Shall we debate it, does a girl have to be stirred before she’ll let a man take her? Of course not. Some of them are, but only a minority; most of them let the apron up because they’ve been curious about it so long. I wish I knew Alma well enough to ask her. I don’t believe she was stirred. She had built up a good defense against being stirred, but curiosity is often so strong that no man or woman can resist it. Working with fossils, I have had the thought that probably back in the Devonian, or even in the Silurian — Hi, Alma.”

She had opened a door and stepped in. Four of us stood up. The custom of standing up when a female enters is hanging on longer in Montana than in Manhattan, and of course when Mel and Emmett did, Pete and I did too. Wolfe did not. He almost never does when a woman enters his office, and he had broken so many rules in the past three days that it must have given him real satisfaction to be able to stick to one. He had been introduced to Alma, and to Carol and Flora, when we arrived.

“Come and get it,” Alma said, “before the grease sets.” She had probably heard that summons to a meal before she grew teeth.

Mel went to wash his hands and the rest of us went to the dining room, which had been added on at Carol’s request when Lily had had things done to the house. There was plenty of room at the long table; there were times when as many as four or five extra men had to be fed. Wolfe was put between Carol and Alma, and I was across from him and had a good view of his reaction to the tomato soup out of a can. He got it down all right, all of it, and the only thing noticeable was noticed only by me: that he carefully did not permit me to catch his eye. Flora was with us, between Mel and Emmett, and she helped Carol and Alma take out the soup plates and bring in dishes of mashed potatoes, string beans, and creamed onions. Then the real Montana trout deal, served by Carol and Alma from big trays. The longest and biggest foil bundle went to Wolfe. I had told him you didn’t transfer it onto your plate; you just opened it up and pitched in. Which he did, after the women had sat and started theirs. His was a fine fish, a fat fifteen-inch rainbow Lily had caught, which she had shown me with pride, and I hoped it was cooked through. He used his knife and fork on it expertly, conveyed a bite to his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Remarkable.”

That settled it; I would have to hit him for a raise. If redeeming me was worth that, I was being underpaid.