Death Of A Dude Read Online Free PDF

yards is too far to count on a hand gun, so it had been a rifle, and in the middle of a Montana summer nobody goes out with a rifle for anything with four legs, except maybe a coyote, and you don’t climb Blue Grouse Ridge for a coyote.
    I picked a handful of berries and went and sat on a rock. I may as well admit it, I had been ass enough to hope that a look at the scene would give me a notion of some kind that would open a crack. It hadn’t and it wouldn’t. This wasn’t my world, and if in that jumble of outdoor stuff there was some hint of who had sneaked up on Philip Brodell and plugged him, it wasn’t for me. Three hours wasted. When a chipmunk showed and darted into a clump, I picked up a pebble the size of a golf ball, and when he skipped out I threw it at him, and of course missed. And at the cabin some of my best friends were chipmunks. Pleased with nothing whatever, I headed downhill and made it back to Farnham’s and the car without breaking a leg. There was no one around. It was a little after five-thirty when I arrived at the cabin, and supper was at six.
    The rule was to go to supper as you were, but sweat had dried on me, so I went to my room and rinsed off and changed to a PSI shirt and brown woolen slacks. As I was brushing my hair there was a tap on the door of the little hall between Lily’s room and mine and I went and opened it to her. She was still in the same green shirt and slacks, and when she saw I had changed she said, “Company coming?” and I told her where I had been, spotting the bloody boulder for her by saying it was about two hundred yards north of where she had once watched me pick a fool hen off a tree with one hand. Also I told her about my talks with Alma and Carol.
    “I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I’ve bought it. I have filed her. Her hand on a Bible might not have sold me, but her hand on that saddle did.”
    Lily had puckered her lips. She unpuckered them and nodded. “All right, then that’s settled. I wanted to try that saddle on Cat once just to see how it sat, and she wouldn’t let me. You were right. If she had shot him she would have told you. But don’t get the idea that you’re a better judge of women than I am.”
    Not meaning that she had wanted to try the saddle on a bobcat or mountain lion. She had named her pinto mare Cat because of the way she had jumped a ditch the first day she rode her, three years ago.
    We ate breakfast and lunch in the kitchen, on a table by the big window, and sometimes supper too, but usually the place for supper was the screened terrace on the creek side. It was more trouble because Lily brought no one but Mimi from New York and wouldn’t have local help, and the table-waiting was done by us. That evening it was filets mignons, baked potatoes, spinach, and raspberry sherbet, and everything but the potatoes had come from the king-size walk-in deep freeze in the storeroom. The filets mignons had been shipped by express from Chicago, packed in dry ice. You might suppose that with all of the thousands of tons of beef on the hoof just across the creek, Lily’s property, there was a better and cheaper way, but that had been tried and found wanting.
    At table on the terrace Lily always sat facing the creek, which was only a dozen steps from the terrace edge, with Wade Worthy on her left and me on her right and Diana Kadany across from her. As she picked up her knife Diana said, “I had an awful thought today. Utterly awful.”
    Of course that was a cue. It was Wade Worthy who obliged her by taking it. I hadn’t fully decided about Wade. His full-cheeked face, with a broad nose and a square chin, had an assortment of grins, and they were hard to sort out. The friendly grin looked friendly, but with it he might say something sour, and with the grin that looked sarcastic he might say something nice. The one he gave Diana now was neither of those, just polite. With it he said, “You’re not a good judge of your own