Rex Stout
Death Of A Dude
Chapter 1
I began it 'NW' and signed it 'AG' not to be different, but from habit. Nearly all of my written communications to Nero Wolfe over the years had been on a sheet of a memo pad, for Fritz to take up to his room on his breakfast tray, or put by me on his desk when he was upstairs in bed and I had returned from an evening errand. They had all begun 'NW' and ended 'AG' so this did too, though it wasn't scribbled. It was typed on an Underwood on a table in a corner of the big room in Lily Rowan's cabin in a corner of her ranch, and it was in the airmail envelope I poked through the slot in the post office in Timberburg, the county seat, that Saturday morning-on a letterhead that had Bar JR Ranch, Lame Horse, Montana in big type across the top. Not as elegant as the one with her New York penthouse address. Below, it said:
Friday 8:13pm
August 2, 1968
NW:
It's a real mess here and I'm stuck. I didn't go into details on the phone Monday because someone at the exchange might be cooperating with the sheriff or the county attorney (in New York he would be district attorney), or there might even be a tap on Miss Rowan's line. Modern science certainly gets around.
Since you never forget anything or anybody you remember Harvey Greve, who once told you there in the office that he had bought a lot of livestock, horses and cattle and calves, for Roger Dunning, which helped do for Dunning. I believe I have mentioned that he has been running Miss Rowan's ranch for the last four years, and he still is-or was until six days ago, last Saturday, when he was charged with murder and parked in the cooler- namely the county jail. A dude named Philip Brodell had been shot in the back and then in the front while he was picking huckleberries. As I have told you, these mountain huckleberries are different. This time I'll try to bring you some.
Miss Rowan and I have decided that Harvey didn't do it, and I'm stuck. If it had been plain and simple that he did it I would have been back there to keep your desk dusted when I was supposed to, day before yesterday. Miss Rowan has hired a lawyer from Helena with a reputation that stretches from the Continental Divide to the Little Missouri, and it would be his problem. But I suspect he doesn't see it as we do. His head's on it, but I don't think his heart's in it. Mine is, and one will get you fifty that Harvey's clean. So you see how it is, I've got a job. Even if I had no obligation to Miss Rowan as her guest and an old friend, I've known Harvey Greve too long and too well to bow out and leave him in a squeeze.
Of course from July 31, day before yesterday, I'm on leave of absence without pay. I hope to be back soon, but as it stands now I have no suggestions for a replacement for Harvey in the jug, and it looks like-excuse it, as if-there'll have to be one with good credentials. If you want to have Saul or Orrie at my desk, my strictly personal things are up in my room, so all my secrets are safe. Television here is often a bust, and I have got to be back in time for the World Series. Give Theodore my regards and tell Fritz my first thought every morning is him- the breakfast in his kitchen I'm missing. In these parts the two favourite nicknames for pancakes are torture disks and gut plasters. AG
When he got it, probably Monday, he would lean back and glare at my chair for a good ten minutes.
As I left the post office I took a look at my shopping list. The population of Timberburg was only 7463, but it was the biggest batch between Helena and Great Falls, and its customers covered a lot of territory- from the Fishtail River, where the hills graduated into mountains, east to where the range got so flat you could see a coyote two miles off. So in about an hour I got everything on my list, with four stops on the main drag and two on side streets. The items:
Big Six Mix pipe tobacco for Mel Fox. With Harvey in the coop he was too busy at the ranch to go shopping.
Fly swatters for Pete Ingalls. He never raised his foot to the stirrup without one dangling from his saddle horn, for horseflies.
Typewriter ribbon for the Underwood.
