Free Death Of A Dude by Rex Stout

hall, there’s a gun that would have done fine-a Mawdsley Special double-decker. Either of them would have trouble hitting a barn with it, let alone a barn door, as they proved a couple of weeks ago when Diana and I took on Worthy and Miss Rowan for a target tournament, but that fits in, since X was a lousy shot. So there’s two possibles, right here. Morley Haight, the sheriff, didn’t check the gun, with Miss Rowan’s permission, until Friday afternoon. It was clean, but there had been plenty of time to see to that.”
    “His motive'Or hers?”
    “I’ll come to it. On opportunity they also qualify. Mimi Deffand, who will cook your breakfast unless you would rather do it yourself had the day off, with Miss Rowan and me picnicking at the river, and she spent it in Timberburg. I haven’t pumped my fellow guests, but it appears from conversation that Diana picnicked too, up the creek at what we call the second pool, and got back around six o’clock, so Worthy was here alone. Beautiful. No alibi for either of them, and they would be hot if there was the slightest smell of motive. Neither of them had ever seen Brodell, they say. I saw him a few times last year-he and Farnham came for supper once, and we went there-and he liked shows and had been to New York, I don’t know how often. I thought of writing Saul to ask him to see if he could dig up a contact between Brodell and either of them, but you know what a job that is-at five Cs a week, which is what it would cost Miss Rowan.”
    “That wouldn’t break me,” Lily said, “but I simply can’t believe they were lying when they said they had never seen him or heard of him. That was the day after he came, when I told them the father of Alma’s baby was back.”
    “I missed a chance,” I said, “of seeing them with him, but I didn’t know he would be dead in about twenty hours. Farnham invited Miss Rowan and her guests to supper Wednesday, and she and Diana went, but Worthy and I didn’t. I have no ironbound rule against eating a meal with a man who has seduced a girl, but Brodell wasn’t on my list of pets anyhow, so I skipped it and won eighty cents at gin rummy with Worthy, who was off his feed and wanted to go to bed early.”
    I flipped a hand. “They’re good samples of the possibles. At the Farnham place there are a cook and houseworker, two wranglers, four dudes, and Farnham himself. At the Bar JR there are Flora Eaton, who does laundry and house chores, Mel Fox, in charge now with Harvey gone, and two cowboys. Carol and Alma, the wife and daughter, are crossed off-not just their mutual alibi, I’ll tell you why when we’re on details. That’s fifteen possibles who were within walking distance, and add the adult population of Monroe County. Anyone could have driven here, and about two miles beyond where you turned off on the lane to this cabin he could have left the car and climbed the ridge. Farnham says that last year Brodell was in Timberburg three or four times, and I spent three days there digging up contacts.”
    “He took a box of huckleberries to the girl who sells tickets at the movie theater,” Lily said.
    Wolfe grunted. “Was it a mania'Did he come here from St. Louis only to pick huckleberries?”
    I said no, he also rode horses and fished. “Much of my three days in Timberburg was spent on Gilbert Haight-on people who know him. Besides the Greves, he’s the only one with any visible known motive. His alibi could be a phony, but to crack it you’d have to prove that at least three people are liars, and you couldn’t expect any help from the county men, since his father is the sheriff. One of the aspects of the situation is Sheriff Haight’s personal slants on it. It suits him fine to have Harvey on the hook for murder, because Harvey was pretty active against him when he ran for sheriff. The county attorney, Thomas R. Jessup, is not so keen on it because Harvey helped some to get him elected, but he can’t stall even if he wants