The telephone rang. She took a deep shivering breath, then, with no hesitation and with firm steps, went to the little table, put the receiver to her ear and said, “Hello?”
“Is this the Brand residence?”
“Yes. This is Delia Brand.”
“Is your sister there? Clara Brand?”
“No, she isn’t here.”
“Well, hold the wire. The county attorney wants—”
“Wait a minute.” Delia’s voice was clear and steady. “Hello? Send a doctor here at once. There’s a man here that’s been shot and he may be dying. Send a—”
“What! You say shot? Who—”
Delia hung up. Her fingers trembled as she got the phone directory and flipped the pages to the T’s, but she found the number without fumbling, took up the receiver again, and dialed. As she waited her back was to the couch and the chair.
“Is this the parsonage?”
“Yes, ma’am. This is the housekeeper.”
“This is Delia Brand. Is my sister Clara there?”
“No, ma’am, she’s left.”
“How long ago?”
“Oh, maybe five or ten minutes. I let her in the church because she said she’d rather wait there, and she came back and said she wouldn’t wait any more and she left.”
“Thank you very much.”
Delia hung up again. For the next call she didn’t need to consult the book, for she knew the number of Ty Dillon’s little apartment on Beech Street. In a moment she removed the receiver once more and dialed. There was no answer to the ringing. When she heard a car in the driveway, continuing to the garage, she kept the receiver to her ear; at the sound of steps on the porch, she lowered it; as Clara appeared in the door she dropped it on the rack.
“He wasn’t there,” Clara said. “Why didn’t you go to bed? I waited an hour, but Mrs. Bonner didn’t know—” She stopped, transfixed, her eyes aimed past Delia’s shoulder at the middle of the room. “Del! Good God, what is it?” She ran across, stooped, peered, straightened up, faced her sister. “Del! For God’s sake, Del—”
“No!” Delia said fiercely, bitterly. “He came here — he came in and sat down and said he had been shot and he was dying — and I thought you had — I thought you — and now you thought I... we are thinking each other—”
She burst into laughter. She stood laughing crazily, swaying, her shoulders shaking and rocking back and forth. Clara sprang for her, seized her shoulders, and pressed her forcibly into a chair. “Sis, for God’s sake stop— Sis! Stop it! I didn’t think anything! Sis, Del darling, you mustn’t, you mustn’t—”
Ed Baker’s voice sounded from the door. “They’re both here.”
Clara froze. Delia was giggling.
Baker went on, entering, “Over there, doc, in the chair. If he’s dead don’t move him till I get a look. Bring the boys in, Frank. There’s enough here for everybody.”
Chapter 15
The average daily circulation of the Times-Star for the year was 9,400. Wednesday and Thursday the pressrun had been 12,000 and 14,200, respectively. Friday it was 17,600, an all-time high.
Rarely did the Fowler Hotel have newspaper reporters, much less photographers, registered as its guests. Even when a public figure was within the county, the world learned of their daily doings only through the services of local journalists. But by Friday noon the register could boast eleven such entries, from Spokane, Denver, the coast, and points between.
Governor Matthews of Wyoming was a democratic man. Ordinarily no qualification was necessary in order to achieve entrance into his office at the capitol at Cheyenne except two legs to walk in with. But on Friday he didn’t even go there himself. He was in a room with a locked door at the Pyramid Club in Cody and the only people who knew it were there with him.
The church of which the Reverend Rufus Toale was pastor had always been open on weekdays, for those who might wish to enter to pray, but seldom might more than one or two suppliants have been discovered there. Friday they straggled in and out all day, pointing out to each other inside, with whispers, the place where Clara Brand had sat the evening before, just prior to murdering the pastor. At the same time other people were slowing up their cars as they drove past 139 Vulcan Street, pointing out the windows of the front room in which Delia Brand had shot and killed Rufus Toale, forty-eight hours almost to the minute since she had shot and killed Dan Jackson, which was surely a record. The contradiction was merely one aspect of the raging controversy which had divided Park County into two hostile camps.
In his office on the top floor of the new Sammis Building on Mountain Street, Lem Sammis, with his jaw permanently sidewise, sat gazing across his desk at a man, ten years his junior, whose dark intent eyes displayed neither friendliness nor good humor but yet were not antagonistic. The man was saying:
“No, Lem, I’m not selling any soft soap. You may cut my throat some day or I may cut yours. But we’re together against these rats. Baker turns it off before this day’s over or he’s done, and we’ll get Carlson. The mining business made this state, and by God, the mining business will run it. Maybe your daughter killed Jackson or maybe you did it yourself. I don’t give a damn. I hope to put the screws on you some day, but not like this, and not with that bunch helping me. Matthews has crawled into a hole, but I’ll find him and I’ll deal with him.”
Lem Sammis said coldly, “I’m asking no favors, Ollie.”
“Favors hell. You know and I know how it stands. We can deal with each other after we’ve dealt with this. I’ll get hold of Matthews.”
“When you find him tell him from me—”
“I’m not telling anybody anything from you. I’m telling ’em myself.”
“Go to hell.”
“After you, Lem.”
Ollie Nevins departed. Sammis sat awhile without moving, then reached for his phone and spoke into it. In a moment the door opened and Chief of Police Frank Phelan entered, glanced apprehensively at the old face with the rigid sidewise jaw, crossed to a chair, and sat.
“Well, Frank? They froze you out?”
Phelan nodded gloomily. “They did. They wanted to use my men on a warrant to search Dan’s house and I balked.”
“Who gave ’em the warrant — Merriam?”
“Yes.”
“They going to use it?”
“Yes. A pair of them goddam county tramps.”
Sammis’s jaw went another quarter of an inch sidewise. “Searching Amy’s house. Lem Sammis’s daughter. Huh? Tell me what happened before you left.”
Phelan cleared his throat and started. That was around noon.
It was still happening, at the courthouse. In the county attorney’s office Baker was at his desk, a stenographer with a notebook was across from him, Sheriff Tuttle stood by a window with his hands in his pockets, and Clara Brand was seated in a chair which directly faced Baker’s. She looked resolute and tense, but played out, with her eyes swollen and bloodshot, and her hands, in her lap, kept clasping and unclasping. She was saying:
“I don’t care what you’ve found out or haven’t found out. I told you everything last night and I told you the truth.”
Baker himself looked the worse for wear. His eyes were bloodshot, too, and he had the general appearance of a man indulging in a hangover. He gazed at her and demanded, “Then you stick to your story as you told it last night?”
“I do.”
“And you expect me to believe it? Do you remember what you said? You said that when the housekeeper told you she didn’t know where Toale was or when he would be back, you told her you would wait and you would like to wait in the church, and she got the key and let you in at the rear. So far all right, Mrs. Bonner says the same thing. You told her that no matter what time Toale returned you would be in the church and she was to ask him to join you there. You groped your way down the aisle to the pew your mother always occupied, and you sat there an hour without moving. Then suddenly you decided to leave, to go home, and you went and told Mrs. Bonner and then got in your car and drove home. That was your story.”