Free Rex Stout by The Mountain Cat Page B

here to see me. Delia didn’t want me to let him in, but I did, and I let him talk to me then and two or three times since, because I thought maybe he would let it out about mother. I asked him pointblank what he had talked so often with mother about and he said her secrets rested with her in the grave. He said he wanted to labor with me to return me to God. I hadn’t been going to church since he had started coming to see mother. I couldn’t stand it to sit and look at him and listen to him.”
    “How did that make it worse?”
    “Because … I got a notion that Delia thought Rufus Toale was beginning to do to me what he had done to mother. I told her I was sort of stringing him along, or trying to, but I should have realized, the condition she was in about Rufus Toale, that that wouldn’t reassure her. Mother had evaded our questions about him for two months.”
    Dillon gazed at her, frowning deeply, considering.
    “But,” he offered finally, “while she may have hated Toale enough to want to kill him, what if she hated Jackson that much too?”
    “Why should she?”
    “Well, what if … what if she …?” He couldn’t get it out. He demanded savagely, “Did you read the paper? Did you get all the hints? Do you know what the whole damned town is saying? About Jackson and women?”
    “What has that got to do with Delia?”
    Dillon blurted, “Is she a woman?”
    “Oh, you mean … Oh.” Clara compressed her lips, then opened them to say, “You’re a swell lover, you are. You’re a hot one. First you accuse her of murder and now you accuse her of being one of Dan Jackson’s women—”
    “I don’t accuse her of anything!” The misery in his eyes was in fact anything but accusatory. “But good God, what am I going to think? What am I going to believe? What do you suppose I came here for? What in the name of heaven was she doing in Jackson’s office at night with a gun in her hand?”
    “The gun was there on a chair and she picked it up.”
    “What was she doing there?”
    “She went to give Jackson a note, signed by Mr. Sammis, instructing him to keep me employed there. Jackson had fired me.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “She did and Mr. Sammis did.”
    “Did you see the note?”
    “No, I think the sheriff has it. But anybody who thinks Delia had anything to do with Jackson—that’s utter nonsense. Or me either. I got those dirty hints in the paper, but I thought they were aimed at me. NeitherDelia or I would have let Dan Jackson touch us with a ten-foot pole—what’s the idea?”
    He had jumped to his feet and pounced at her. “Shake!” He seized her hand and crunched the bones. “Put it there! What the hell! Dear sweet darling beautiful Clara! I’m going to set that—”
    “I’m not your darling and you broke my knuckles.”
    “Okay. Excuse me.” He grabbed her hand again, planted a kiss on the back of it and sat down on the bench opposite her. “There. Now I can fight with my heart in it. If I can make my brain work. What was it—Oh, yes! You say the gun was there on a chair. How did it get from her handbag onto the chair?”
    “Her handbag was there too, lying on the desk.”
    “All right, who took the gun out?”
    “She doesn’t know. Nobody knows. The handbag with the gun and cartridges in it had been stolen from the car in the afternoon while it was parked on Halley Street.”
    “Who says so?”
    “She does.”
    “How did she get it back?”
    “She didn’t get it back. The first she saw it again, when she went to Jackson’s office to give him that note, he was there dead and the handbag was on the desk and the gun was on a chair.”
    Dillon stared with bulging eyes. “She didn’t take the handbag to the office at all?”
    “Certainly not, how could she? She didn’t have it. It had been stolen.”
    “And it was there when she … and the gun … good God.” Dillon’s mouth worked. “Then look here. It’s worse even … so that’s what it’s