“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.”