The Mountain Cat

Chapter 6

At the time that Evelina Sammis was taking off her shoes in the Brand kitchen, her husband was seated at his mahogany desk in his private office on the top floor of the new Sammis Building at 214 Mountain Street, obviously in bad humor, though not displaying the sidewise set of the jaw which foretold the imminent approach of one of his famous fits of temper. Two other men were with him. The one in the armchair, above middle age, who hadn’t shaved that morning, with shrewd cold eyes and a thin-lipped mouth, was Harvey Anson, generally regarded as the ablest lawyer in the state. The other was Frank Phelan, the Cody Chief of Police. He sat with his ankles crossed, displaying bright green socks, looking as hot and harassed as a dog chasing a dragonfly.

“I wouldn’t say that,” he muttered protestingly.

“I would,” Lem Sammis declared with irate conviction. “I made Bill Tuttle sheriff of this county, and I made Ed Baker county attorney, and now they start playing with that damn bronco that thinks he can cut my cinch. They figure I’m seventy years old and about ready to turn up my toes, and when that happens that squarehead will take it over and they want to be already in his corral. But he figures it wrong himself. The way to do it is to start throwing the bridle while I’m still alive. Believe me. I’ve still got a little say-so in this state and this county and this town. Have I, Frank, or haven’t I?”

“Sure you have.” The chief of police scratched his elbow. “You’re the boss and with me that goes one hundred percent. But this isn’t just a matter of say-so. It’s murder. You can’t expect Ed or Bill either to turn that girl loose when she was caught flat-footed like that. There’d be more whizzing around their heads than they could ever duck.”

“The girl’s innocent. Dellie Brand never did it.”

“Oh, my God, Lem. Have a heart.”

“Did she do it, Harvey?”

Anson smiled thinly and said, “I’m her attorney.”

“And you say she’ll have to stand trial?”

“She will if Ed Baker indicts her and it looks like he’s going to.”

Sammis’s jaw started a slow sidewise movement. The chief of police saw it and put in hastily, “Now for God’s sake, Lem, take it easy. You know I’m for you like I’m for three meals a day. Maybe you’re right about Ed and Bill playing a little mumblety-peg with the squarehead, but whether they are or not, they couldn’t act any different in this case and stay in Wyoming. Look here.”

Frank Phelan drew his feet in, leaned forward with his elbows resting on his thighs, and put the tip of his right index finger on the little one of his other hand. “One. She was found there by Squint Hurley with the gun in her hand, still warm, and it was her gun and she was acting dazed but with no fight in her, the way a girl would be after shooting a man. Two. Her handbag was on the desk, not under her arm, and why would she have put it down if she had just entered the room? Three. Since you had given her your word that her sister wouldn’t be fired, why did she have to go there in such a hurry at night to give Jackson that note? Four. There was a paper in her handbag with a question in her handwriting, addressed to a lawyer, asking how to escape the penalty for committing murder. Five. She was sore at Jackson and had had a scrap with him in the afternoon.”

He shifted hands. “Six. She bought a box of cartridges at MacGregor’s yesterday morning and told the clerk that she was going to shoot a man. Maybe you haven’t heard about that. That’s what she did. The clerk, a kid named Marvin Hopple, phoned us on his lunch hour yesterday and told us about it, but the boys just laughed it off and didn’t even bother to report it to me. I’ve talked to Hopple, and that’s what she did. Now I admit here’s a funny thing. She denies she had any intention of shooting Jackson or any reason to shoot him. She admits she wrote that question on the paper and she told Hopple she was going to shoot a man, but she won’t say who it was she had it in for. She only denies it was Jackson. Well, if it was Jackson, and she announced it in advance and didn’t intend to conceal it, but was going to plead justification, why did she change her mind and take the line she didn’t do it? I admit that’s funny. Maybe she just lost her nerve... Anyway, seven. We don’t have—”

“Excuse me.” It was Harvey Anson’s tight deceptively mild voice, parsimonious of breath. “She doesn’t admit she wrote that question on the paper or that she had any intention of shooting anyone.”

“She did before you got hold of her and sealed her up.”

“So you say.”

“Certainly so I say.” Phelan looked more harassed than ever. “Hell, I’m not on the witness stand, am I? I’m the chief of police, and here I sit spilling my guts to the defense attorney, don’t I? Is this a friendly talk or what is it?”

The lawyer nodded faintly and repeated in the same voice. “Excuse me.”

“All right.” Phelan still held his fingers on the count. “Seven. We don’t have to assume that Jackson’s firing her sister was her motive, which I admit sounds weak, especially since her sister wasn’t being fired after all. Everybody in this town knows Jackson’s reputation, whether we like it or not. Investigation will show whether Delia Brand was one of the females—”

“You can keep that in your throat!” Lem Sammis’s jaw finished the movement this time. “None of that from you or anybody else! And not only about Dellie Brand! Get this, Frank, and by God, keep it: whether it’s connected with Dellie Brand or no matter who, there’ll be no investigation of my son-in-law’s dealings with women and no court testimony, and no publicity! My daughter married that polecat and she’s had enough trouble from it!”

The chief of police lifted his broad shoulders and dropped them. “If you can stop Bill and Ed and the whole shebang. There was that piece in the Times-Star already this morning—”

“And the fellow that wrote it is already out on his neck!”

A shade of awe appeared in Phelan’s eyes. “You made ’em tie a can to Art Gleason?”

“I did!”

“Okay. You win that round, Lem.”

“And you sitting there counting your fingers! Take what you say about the handbag! She didn’t have the handbag! It had been stolen from her and it had the gun in it!”

“Who says so?”

“She does, damn it!”

“Now, Lem, be reasonable.” Phelan upturned a pleading palm. “We’re not holding court, we’re just having a talk. What would you expect her to say? She had to say something or nothing, didn’t she? Of course it would have been better for her if she had made it nothing, even before Anson got there. That story about the bag being snitched from her car simply stinks and you know darned well it does. Picture how it will sound to a jury if she gets on the stand and tells it, without any corroboration, and she’ll have to tell it because no one else can, and if she’s put on the stand picture how she’s going to answer—”

“She won’t get on the stand! She won’t go to court! I say she won’t!”

“All right, Lem.” Phelan slowly shook his head. “I’ve seen you do everything to this town except hang it on the line to dry, and I’ve wore out three hats taking them off to you, but if you keep that Brand girl out of a courtroom I’ll just go bareheaded!”

Bill Tuttle, Sheriff of Park County, sat in his office in the courthouse, which was on the basement floor, at the near end of the corridor leading to the warden’s office and the jail at the rear. In appearance he was not a frontier-style western sheriff, but neither was he streamlined. His visible apparel, from across the desk, consisted of a pink shirt, a purple tie and a black alpaca coat; and the most striking fact about his face was that someone had at some time or other hurled a boulder at his nose and hit it square. Hardly less would have accounted for its being so grotesque a slab.

He was wishing he was somewhere else. There would be no profit and no glory from the Dan Jackson murder case; quite the contrary. The Brand girl had been caught flat-footed and there was nothing to it; but it was dynamite. He knew Art Gleason had been fired by the owners of the Times-Star and he knew why. Art Gleason booted into the alley! When Tuttle had made a long distance call, around dawn, to Senator Carlson (called, by some, the squarehead) in Washington, he knew what Carlson meant when he said that all good citizens would demand that justice be done without fear or favor; he meant that this might possibly be the long-awaited opportunity to put old Lem Sammis on the ropes; and though Carlson was unquestionably the coming man, it was too early to say that Sammis was even going, let alone gone.

In the meantime, in conjunction with the county attorney and the chief of police, he was proceeding with his duty, the collection of evidence, already overwhelming. He didn’t know that at that moment the chief of police was in friendly conference with Lem Sammis and the defense attorney, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if he had.

The phone buzzed and he picked up the instrument and asked it testily, “Well?”

“Dr. Rufus Toale again. Wants to speak to you.”

“Put him on.”

He made a face at a corner of the desk, which with his nose was scarcely necessary, and in a moment said with great amiability, “Yes, Dr. Toale? This is Sheriff Tuttle.”

“God bless you and keep you, Brother Tuttle. I am anxious about Delia — Miss Brand. Is she still asleep?”

“Yes, she is. She was ten minutes ago.”

“Praise God. The precious child. The precious soul. You won’t forget to let me know when she awakens?”

“I’ll notify you at once, Dr. Toale.”

“God bless you. And tell her, please, that I am coming to see her. As I warned you, she will say no, but we must trust to His grace and goodness and I must see her.”

“I understand. I’ll tell her. Er — Mrs. Welch will tell her.”

“That fine woman! She’s a fine woman, Brother Tuttle!”

“She sure is. Thank you for calling.” The sheriff hung up and shoved the phone from him as if it with its own tongue had Brother Tuttled him. Not that he was irreligious, but he was then feeling that no man was his brother. After glaring at the phone a little he pulled it back and spoke into it. “Is that reporter out there, the one that flew from San Francisco? Send him in here.”

That interview lasted half an hour, partly because it was interrupted four or five times by phone calls. The door was closing behind the reporter when the phone rang again to say that Tyler Dillon was outside, accompanied by Clara Brand. They were ushered in and they both took chairs.

Tuttle glanced at Clara’s strained face, at her hands twisted in her lap. “Is there something I can do for you, Miss Brand? I told Mr. Sammis I wouldn’t need you any more, at least for the present. Didn’t he tell you?”

“She’s with me,” Dillon put in.

“I don’t need her with you. I’d like to see you alone. What’s the idea, anyway? Didn’t you say you’d wait outside till I could see you?”

“I got tired waiting. I had an appointment with Miss Brand and I wanted to keep it. For a consultation in the interest of my client.”

“Who’s your client?”

“Her sister, Delia Brand.”

“Your client?”

“Yes. She was my client even before this ridiculous charge was brought against her. On another matter, of course.”

“She was?”

“Yes. She called at my office yesterday morning to consult me.”

“She did? You admit that?”

“Admit it? I state it as a fact.”

“Was it on that occasion that she asked you a certain question which she had written down on a piece of paper?”

“Now, Sheriff. Really! Surely you know that you can’t question counsel about interviews with his client.”

“No?”

“Certainly not. That’s elementary.”

Tuttle frowned. “I can’t ask you about a piece of paper with your name on it and a question about how to do a murder?”

“Not if it has any connection, or is supposed to have any connection, with my client.”

“You refuse to answer?”

“Under the circumstances, of course.”

The sheriff’s frown deepened. He stood up abruptly, said, “Wait here a minute,” and left the room.

There was a silence. They looked at each other and Clara said, “This may be a terrible mistake. I should have talked to Mr. Sammis first. I... I’m scared.”

“Buck up, Clara.” He tried to smile encouragingly. “I haven’t involved you yet, anyhow. I’ll push ahead as far as I can without you, but you stick. Huh?”

She nodded wretchedly.

Ten minutes passed before the sheriff returned, and when he came he was accompanied by a plump competent-looking man in a natty tropical worsted suit with a cornflower in the lapel. He exchanged greetings with Dillon and crossed to shake hands with Clara, replying to a question from Tuttle:

“Sure I know Miss Brand, we’re old Cody folks. I knew her when she wore a braid down her back, before I ever thought I’d be county attorney. I hope you realize, Clara...” He stopped, gave that up, and turned to the young lawyer. “What’s this the sheriff tells me, Dillon? About Delia Brand being your client?”

“That’s right. She is. And I want to see her.”

“She hasn’t made any mention of it.”

“Maybe she hasn’t had a chance, with a stampede rushing her.”

Ed Baker, Park County Attorney, smiled tolerantly. “She’s had plenty of chance to say anything she wants to. You’re not her counsel of record. Harvey Anson is.”

“I’m her counsel.”

“On this case? This murder charge?”

“I’m her counsel. She came to my office just yesterday morning to consult me.”

“So I understand. Was that when she asked you a question she had written on a piece of paper?”

Dillon shook his head. “Privileged communication, Mr. Baker.”

The county attorney shrugged. It might have ended there, with nothing more violent than a shrug, but for the interruption that suddenly interposed. The door was flung open and Lem Sammis entered on the charge. Behind him was Frank Phelan, chief of police, panting a little, and bringing up the rear was Harvey Anson, somehow keeping up with no appearance of precipitancy.

Sammis got to the center of the room, glared around, and picked on Ed Baker. His lower jaw was set a full half inch to the left. “What the hell do you mean phoning Anson to ask by what authority he is representing Delia Brand?”

The county attorney met the glare manfully, but he stuttered a little. “I t-t-told Anson on the phone. There seems to be a little mix-up. Young Dillon here says he is Delia Brand’s counsel.”

“Bah!” Sammis whirled. “I don’t know you. Who are you?”

“I’m a lawyer. Tyler Dillon. I came from the coast two years ago and I’m with Escott, Brody and Dillon.”

“What are you doing here? Cough it up! What is it, Phil Escott trying to horn in or Ed Baker here trying some trick riding?”

“Neither one. I’m Miss Brand’s counsel, that’s all.”

“Who says so?”

“I do.”

Sammis snorted contemptuously. “I knew a man once that said he was a grizzly bear with cubs. Get out of here! Get out of this courthouse and stay out! Vamoose!”

“This courthouse,” said Dillon firmly, “belongs to the people of the County of Park and you’re only one of them. I’m aware that I may be required to furnish confirmation of my statement that I am Delia Brand’s counsel. I suggest that you ask her sister here.”

His eyes, turned to Clara, were appealing, even desperate. But it was too much to expect of her. Lem Sammis’s eyes were on her too, gleaming from behind their ramparts, and all her twenty-four years had been lived in the domain of which he was the uncrowned monarch. He growled, “You gone crazy or something, Clara?”

“No... I...” She swallowed. “I don’t know anything about it. I only know what he told me this morning. I know he’s a friend of Delia’s—”

“Friend hell!” Sammis wheeled. “Get out before I kick you out, and I can still do it!”

Dillon’s face was pale, but with his feet planted he said resolutely, “I demand to see Delia Brand! I demand—”

Sammis started for him. Others moved too, but not eagerly, for the complications of trying to stop Lem Sammis on the warpath had been demonstrated on various occasions. There was a general expression of relief when it was seen that a figure had got squarely between the old man and the young one. It was Harvey Anson, himself close to Sammis’s age. With his hand raised, not belligerently, to the level of Sammis’s advancing chest, he allowed his thin lips to emit words:

“Wait, Lem. No use of all this. This young fellow looks like a good honest boy, even if his name is on Phil Escott’s door.” Having halted Sammis, he turned around. “So your name’s Tyler Dillon. I understand the sheriff and county attorney asked you some questions that had to do with Delia Brand and you refused to answer. That right?”

“It is.”

Anson nodded with a minimum of effort. “This morning Delia told me that she went to see you yesterday for legal advice. Naturally that made you her counsel.”

“That’s what I say, I’m her counsel.”

“Of course you are. But do you say that she specifically engaged you to defend her on this murder charge?”

“How could she?” Dillon was truculent. “There hadn’t been any murder—”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“Has anyone?”

“Not yet.”

Anson smiled the ghost of a smile. “Then it’s quite simple. There’s no occasion for any fuss. You’re not defending her on the murder charge and you’re not going to. I am. But you are her counsel, you know in what connection, I don’t.” He turned to confront the county attorney and his voice, though it remained scanty as to volume, was suddenly full of bite. “Ed, have you ever tried reading any law? And would you like to see a list of the Bar Association members of the committee that deals with infractions of ethics like trying to coerce information from a counselor regarding a privileged communication? And would you like to get Washington on long distance, as you did at twenty minutes past four this morning, and ask Carlson what job he has to suggest for you in case you happen to lose the one you’ve got now?”

Baker opened his mouth and shut it again.

Tyler Dillon demanded of the room and all in it, “I want to see Delia Brand! I have a right to see her!”

“Not now, my boy,” said Harvey Anson. “I’m sorry, but not just at present. Why don’t you drop in at my office this afternoon? Maybe we ought to have a little talk.”

Dillon looked around at the faces and saw it was hopeless. There was no one there susceptible to any appeal or pressure within his power. Sammis was still choleric, Phelan was impotent, Tuttle was hostile, Baker was speechless and Anson was impervious. There was nothing he could do. He wanted most of all to see her; he had a feeling that if only he could see her, for a brief moment even, he would then be able to think of things and do them — startling and efficient and conclusive things. He had gone about it wrong, he saw that now, but he must and would see her...

He turned on his heel and left the room.

Halfway down the gloomy basement corridor he heard quick light footsteps behind him and then was stopped by a hand on his arm.

It was Clara.

“I’m sorry, Ty,” she said, looking up at him. “I mean that I didn’t make good on what I said. But I didn’t know Mr. Sammis would be there and I just couldn’t. Anyway, it’s all right now, since they can’t question you about that paper.”

“I hope to heaven it is,” he said morosely. “But I’ve got to see her. I’ve got to find out... and what are they going to do? What are they doing? Someone has to do something!”

“They are. Surely they are.”

“I wish I thought so. I’m going to the office and see Escott and put it up to him. He’s friendly with Baker and maybe he can arrange for me to see her. Do you want to come along?”

“I guess I’ll go back home.”

They were outside in the shaded areaway and were about to emerge into the sunshine. Two men and a woman stood at the foot of the stone steps, talking. There was an exchange of glances, and the men and Dillon lifted their hats. The woman left them and approached. The electronic dispersion seemed to work as well outdoors as within walls; it competed successfully even with the sunshine.

“How do you do,” said Dillon as she got to them. “Have you met—”

“Sure,” Wynne Cowles said brusquely. She passed him up for Clara. “You poor thing. Lord, what a mess! I was out at the ranch and slept late and didn’t hear about it until eleven o’clock. I couldn’t get you on the phone, so I drove in, and you weren’t home so I came here. They told me you were inside and I’ve been waiting. You poor kid!” Her strange eyes probably made a display of compassion impractical, but it was in her voice. “What can I do?”

“Nothing,” said Clara. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“But there must be. I’ve never seen a situation yet where money couldn’t do something. And while I know you don’t want any charity, I would supply almost any amount, and call it a contribution to the public welfare, to keep that child from paying any price whatever for the removal of Dan Jackson.”

“She didn’t remove him. She didn’t do it.”

“No? Just as you say.” Wynne Cowles apparently allowed it as not worth arguing about. “But I mean it, Clara. Aren’t we partners? I’ll get a real lawyer from the coast, or the east, instead of one of these renovators — excuse it, Ty, my love, said only to offend — or I’ll buy a jury, I’ll buy the whole county which is nothing but volcano leavings anyhow, or I’ll round up a bunch of witnesses. I mean it. Anything.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Cowles, but—”

“Make it Wynne. We’re partners, aren’t we? Or M.C., that’s what they call me at the ranch. Short for Mountain Cat.”

“All right. But about being partners... I’m not sure—”

“Why not? You were yesterday.”

“Well — anyhow, it would have to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For this to be — my sister. I couldn’t discuss anything now — or start anything—”

“You’re a softie, Clara. It will do you good to be doing something. Don’t worry about your sister, we’ll take care of her. She’s a nice kid. Saw her yesterday. You ought to snap out of it; you look and talk as if someone had blackjacked you. Let’s go over to my suite at the Fowler and have a cocktail and some lunch and get your mind started working. Or out to the ranch — it only takes forty minutes—”

“I don’t want to go anywhere. Not today. I’m going home. Later I’m coming back here and see Delia.”

“Then I’ll go home with you. Let me go home with you?”

When they had settled for that, Dillon accompanied them to where Wynne Cowles’s long low convertible was parked before he headed for his office on Mountain Street. He hadn’t known that those two were acquainted and certainly not that they were partners.