Phelan had another try, but finally threw up his hands in disgust and told the escort, “Take him and throw him in the river!”
“My God,” Pellett protested, “you’re not going to turn him loose!”
“What can I hold him for? If we book him as a vag we just have to feed him.”
“He knocked me down, didn’t he? Didn’t he assault me? For God’s sake, don’t let him go!”
“Do you want to charge him with assault?”
“I do.”
Phelan nodded to the escort. “All right, boys. Take him over and assign him. Give him dried lizard for supper. Tell Mac, Pellett will sign a charge.”
They trooped out, much less eager than when they had entered. The chief of police sat down, looking weary and fed up. The sheriff rubbed his nose.
Pellett looked from one to the other, got tired of waiting and demanded, “Well? What about my niece? How could she have killed Jackson if her bag was stolen?”
“She couldn’t,” Phelan said, and seemed to be through.
“Well then?”
Phelan aimed a thumb at the sheriff. Tuttle heaved a sigh. “I’ll tell you, Pellett. That’s a good story you’ve got. Now what about it? Officially I’ll say this: we’re much obliged and we’ll investigate it thoroughly, all aspects of it, and form the best opinion we can. Unofficially, naturally you want to do everything you can to help your niece, and it’s too bad you haven’t got any corroboration at all for any of it that’s connected with the bag, since even the man that helped you look for it on the stairs is the one that was murdered, and I imagine the jury will feel about the same way.”
Pellett stood up, his teeth clenched. “You think I’m lying? You think I made it up?”
“I do,” said Tuttle. “Unofficially.”
“I don’t know, Quin,” said Phelan peevishly. “How the hell do I know?”
Pellett, his teeth still clenched, turned and left the room.
It was only a short walk to the new Sammis Building on Mountain Street and he went on foot. Arrived there, he took the elevator to the fourth floor, entered a door halfway down the corridor and told a young woman seated at a desk, “My name is Quinby Pellett. I’m Delia Brand’s uncle. I want to see Mr. Anson.”
She asked him to wait, and disappeared through another door. After a moment she came back and nodded to him. “Come this way, please.”
The following morning the citizens of Cody found on the front page of the Times-Star a display box which read:
It was a good likeness of Quinby Pellett.
Chapter 8
Tyler Dillon slept fitfully that night. He had not seen Delia. He had accomplished nothing. Phil Escott had listened to his recital and plea, and had said he would think it over but it looked like a bad one. So Dillon didn’t sleep well. At six o’clock he got up and dressed because he couldn’t lie still any longer. When the morning paper was delivered he read the display box on the front page three times, then, without waiting for breakfast, got his car and drove to Quinby Pellett’s place, finding him in the living quarters above the taxidermy shop. He was there half an hour, and came away with a new hope and a new despair which approximately balanced each other. After getting some fruit and coffee at a lunchroom on Mountain Street, he went to his office. He wouldn’t be able to see Escott, who would be in court all morning, but Wynne Cowles was expected at ten o’clock to sign some papers connected with her divorce suit. When she came he found occasion to remark that he hadn’t known she was in a partnership with Clara Brand, but all he got in reply was a mind-your-business glance from her, with her pupils gone slightly elliptical.
As soon as Wynne Cowles had departed, he told his stenographer he would be back after lunch and drove to Vulcan Street to see Clara. He found her more depressed and wretched even than she had been the day before. She had visited Delia at eight o’clock, but had been permitted to stay with her only ten minutes. She had seen the Times-Star, but even after Dillon told her all the details he had got from Pellett, her eyes took on no light.
“Do you think Pellett’s lying?” Dillon demanded.
“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “Of course if he had to he would do worse than lie for Del’s sake. He’s crazy about her. He always has liked her better than me. But whether he’s lying or not, you say the sheriff thinks he is.”
Dillon let that go and went on to the chief purpose of his call. “I’m hunting for a straw to grab at,” he declared, “and a thing Pellett said struck me. He thinks there may be some connection between the murder of Jackson and what happened to your father two years ago. That was just about the time I came to Cody and I don’t know much about it. Your father was Jackson’s partner in the grubstaking game, wasn’t he?”
Clara nodded. “He was really Mr. Sammis’s partner, but Jackson was let in on it when he married Amy Sammis. Sammis furnished the money in the first place and Dad did most of the work. In those days nearly everybody in Wyoming who had any cash tried their luck at grubstaking and quite a few did it on a big scale, but Dad was more successful than anyone else because he really worked at it. He didn’t just pick up any loafer that came along, or sit and wait for the prospectors who were down and out to come to him; he went out and got the good ones. At one time they had nearly three hundred grubbers scattered all over the state. That meant an investment of over two hundred thousand dollars and Sammis furnished the money. They made big profits — it was one of their men that found the Sheephorn lode — but Dad didn’t know how to hang onto money. It always fascinated me from the time I was a little girl, the idea of finding gold and silver and zinc and copper buried in the rocks, and sometimes Dad let me go on trips with him. That was another way he was different from other grubstakers; he visited his men no matter where they were, and advised and encouraged them and maybe got them out of trouble.”
“And it was on one of those trips that he was murdered?”
She nodded again. “Down in the Silverside Hills. He was on a regular trip, but he had an unusually big sum of money with him — thirty-two thousand dollars — because he had got a tip that a wild duck had uncovered a big streak over east of Sheridan—”
“What’s a wild duck?”
“A prospector on his own, that hasn’t been staked. Dad was going to take a look at the streak and try to buy the claim if it looked good. He had several stops on the way and he hadn’t got there yet when he was found dead in that old cabin on the rim of Ghost Canyon.” Her lip quivered, and she stopped and got it firmed. “I had been to that old cabin with him just the year before. You couldn’t get to it by car. We had to take horses at Sugarbowl and ride ten or twelve miles.”
“Then whoever killed him had a horse.”