The D.A. Breaks an Egg

“Well, he’d worked hard all his life. No play. Just keeping his nose pushed right down against the grindstone all the time. Made money, but what good did it do him? Made lots of money. People with money aren’t happy. Trouble with having money is you get to depend on money. People who are happy are the ones who have friends.

“When you get money, everyone wants to take it away from you. You have to stand guard over it all the time. Get a little bit careless with it, and you’re right back to where you were in the first place, poor as a church-mouse. Put in all of your time trying to stand between people and your money, and what does it get you? Nothing but ulcers and blood pressure. But I couldn’t talk to Carl. He wouldn’t listen. He was a worker, that boy. Certainly did dig in and work all his life — partially due to his wife. Ain’t going to say anything against her. Made up my mind I wouldn’t when he married, and I never did, and ain’t going to begin now.”

She clamped her lips in a firm straight line and glared at her visitors in grim silence.

“Yes, I can understand,” Selby said, reassuringly, “but, without saying anything against his wife, you can tell us that after she died your brother began to take life a little easier.”

“Of course he did. You should have seen the change in him. Of course he missed her and he did a little grieving but actually it was just like a weight had dropped off of him. Made a big change in him — too much of a change. He never could do things by halves. He started playing just like he worked.”

“Women?” Selby asked.

“How do I know,” she snapped. “I didn’t go spying on him.”

Selby was contritely silent, and, after a moment, she said, “Carl always loved to play poker, gamble, bet on the horses, things like that. He wanted life, gaiety, wanted to go around to night clubs, watch them dance. Get out there on the floor and do a right smart bit of dancing himself. Foolish for a man his age to do it. He’d just turned sixty. A man had ought to start taking care of himself then. Your heart gets tired. Even if it doesn’t tell you about it, it’s still tired. Go pouring a lot more work on it, dancing around a crowded floor in air that’s loaded with alcohol, perfume and tobacco, and there ain’t any good going to come of it. Well, that’s what he wanted, and that’s what he got.”

“Did he have any children?”

“Not a chick. I’m his only living relative.”

“And therefore you inherited the money?” Selby asked.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I just asked.”

“Of course I did. That is, I will. What about it?”

“Nothing.”

“All right, then, nothing.”

“Can you tell me more about your brother’s death?”

“He went to this dude ranch up in Windrift, Montana, and I don’t know what he was doing up there. Never tried to find out. Never cared. I suppose he was frolicking around and trying to have a good time, and if that’s the way he wanted things, why that’s the way he wanted them, and that’s that.

“But when he died, he died pretty sudden-like, and when I started checking up on things I started looking for a bunch of travelers’ checks he carried with him all the time. They’d been cashed. Just a day or two before he died he’d started cashing checks, quite a lot of checks, not too many, but quite a lot.”

“How many?” Selby asked.

“Ten or fifteen thousand dollars, somewhere around in there. I can’t remember the exact amount, thirteen thousand and something, I think it was.”

“All the checks he had with him?”

“No, not all. He carried twenty thousand dollars in checks with him wherever he went. This was his way of being independent. That was his way of showing that he could do whatever he wanted to.

“Land sakes, life isn’t made that way. People can’t do what they want to. People are always doing what they don’t want to do. That’s the way life works, and don’t ask me why. It’s just the fact that you can’t develop none by doing only the things you want to do. You do the things life makes you do, and somehow or other it seems to work out all right. But you take people who are in a position where they can do whatever they want to, and first thing you know they don’t know what they want to do, and then they get sort of goofy. Leastwise, that’s the way it seems to me.”

“So you hired this detective to go and find out what your brother had been doing?”

“Hired this detective to go find out what caused my brother to cash those travelers’ checks, and find out a little more about how he died. Doctors said his heart just gave way. Well, that’s all right. His heart wasn’t as strong when he was sixty as it was when he was twenty, but I just wanted to check up. Just wanted to satisfy myself. Wanted to find out what had happened to him.”

“And did you?”

“Well, I found everything was all right. Leastwise, that’s what that detective wired me.”

Mrs. Nutwell got up from the chair, tapped her way across the room to a writing desk, opened it, and took out a yellow Western Union envelope. She removed the telegram from the envelope and handed it to Selby.