Rex Stout - Alphabet Hicks

“Yes.”

“Then how does it happen you didn’t even know there was a house here?”

“Didn’t I?” Hicks’s brows went up. “That’s odd.”

“Very odd. The taxi man asked you if you wanted to come to the house or the laboratory, and you looked surprised and asked, ‘Why, is there a house?’ ”

“Did I say that?”

“You did. Is it plausible that you would come out here on confidential business for Dundee and not even know there was a house here?”

“No,” Hicks said emphatically. “It’s inconceivable. So either I’m lying about being here on Dundee’s business, which seems pretty farfetched, or else I was kidding the taxi man. That was probably it.” Hicks leaned forward. “Look here, let’s boil it down. I don’t know any of these people, except Dundee. I never saw any of them, including Mrs. Cooper, before today. The only thing I could tell you would be about the job I was on, and I won’t tell you that unless Dundee tells me to. Except, of course, where I was, and what I did and saw and heard, since I got here at ten minutes to three this afternoon. Naturally you can have that if you want.”

“I’ll take it for a starter. Go ahead.”

Hicks did so. Luckily, there was no need for him to falsify in any particular regarding his movements or to resort to any elaborate inventions. Of his first visit to the laboratory, he omitted the detail of Heather Gladd’s tears, and Dundee’s reaction on finding him there. His brief conversation with Heather at the bridge had been, he said, about nothing in particular. He made the point that as far as Heather was concerned, her alibi had more than him to rest on, since dictation had come from Brager over the loudspeaker every few minutes, and her typing of it was down in black and white. After being called to the terrace by Cooper’s cries, and making sure that Mrs. Cooper was dead and notifying the police, he had stayed at the house until the police car entered the drive and had then gone to the laboratory to tell Dundee about it. Later, when Miss Gladd came to the laboratory, it had been apparent that she scarcely knew what she was doing, and he had started back to the house with her, and had stopped in the woods to give her a chance to pull herself together. She had said she wanted to be alone and he had left her there.

Corbett and Beck had questions. They took him back all over it, tightening it up, while the windows went dead as night took the outdoors. Hicks did not underrate Corbett and Beck. While Beck had nothing special in the way of brains, his capacity for vulgar skepticism was practically unlimited; and for all his infantile pseudo joviality, Corbett was smart, and, in a matter involving peril, might be dangerous. Hicks, committed to lies, and, more privately, to the temporary concealment of a fact which he already suspected might prove to be the central clue in the solution of a brutal murder, left no more holes than he had to. He was caught off balance only once, when Corbett suddenly asked:

“Do you know Mrs. Dundee?”

It was totally unexpected, and the answer was not on his tongue where it should have been. To cover the second’s inevitable hesitation, he asked, “Mrs. Dundee? Why?”

“No particular why. Do you know her?”

“Slightly. I know her when I see her.”

“Did you see her here today?”

“No.”

“You’re sure you didn’t see her or hear her here today?”

“If I did it was in my sleep, and I wasn’t asleep.”

He was alert now, fully alert, because he had no notion what could possibly have interested them in Mrs. Dundee. Had Dundee himself carelessly made a slip? If so, and they came on at him now...

They didn’t. They dropped her as abruptly and unexpectedly as they had taken her up. Corbett asked a few more questions about Heather Gladd, and was obviously about at the end of the string, when the sound of sudden commotion and raised voices from the other side of a closed door caused all heads to turn in that direction.

The door burst open. The man in a Palm Beach suit and a battered Panama hat came in, cast a glance around, and called over his shoulder to someone in the other room:

“He’s not in here!”

Manny Beck growled. “Who’s not?”

“The husband. Cooper.”

“He’s outside. One of the cadets has him.”

The man shook his head sadly. “On the contrary,” he declared in a tone of melancholy satisfaction. “He’s gone. Nobody has him.”

“Fer crisake!” Beck bellowed, and bounded from his chair and out of the room. All the others followed him.

George Cooper was gone.

At half past eight Hicks sat at the table in the dining room eating ham and eggs. At his right were Brager and Heather Gladd; across the table were the Dundees, father and son. What talking there was came mostly from R. I. Dundee. Hicks listened to him with one ear, his brain being preoccupied with a violent disapproval of the latest turn in events.

Apparently Cooper had taken to the woods. As Hicks had patched it together from various pieces he had gathered, shortly after sundown, on the terrace, Cooper had become ill. When the spasms had become less acute he had asked for whisky, the policeman had suggested coffee, and they had gone to the kitchen. There the policeman had left him huddled on a chair, waiting for Mrs. Powell to prepare the coffee. Another policeman, sent by Lieutenant Storrs, had come to take Mrs. Powell to the library. When the first policeman returned to the kitchen, somewhat later, no one was there. That was all. Cooper had disappeared. Nobody had seen him go. The cars parked outside were all there. The guard stationed on the drive had nothing to report. Now the inquiry was in abeyance while all hands sought the fugitive.

Hicks didn’t like any part of it. For one thing, he had wanted to talk with George Cooper at the first opportunity. He had followed Martha Cooper from the restaurant, and on to Katonah, on account of the remarkable resemblance of her voice to Mrs. Dundee’s; he had a hunch about that, and it had become more than a hunch when he learned that Dundee’s proof of his wife’s treachery was a record of his wife’s voice on a sonotel plate. But by the time he had learned that, Martha Cooper was dead, and a new and more terrible’ suspicion forced itself on him, hunch or no hunch. Then came this jolt. Did Cooper’s flight mean that he had murdered his wife just to get her out of the way? It looked like it, and it was highly unsatisfactory.

Hicks glanced around at the faces. The other men had eaten as well as he had, but Heather had swallowed only half a piece of toast, in spite of the urging of Mrs. Powell. Hicks’s eyes glittered at her disapprovingly. He didn’t understand why she was there, and he resented anything he didn’t understand. Since she couldn’t eat, why the devil did she stick around in that dismal company? Why didn’t she go up to her room and lie down, or pace the floor, or cry, or sit at the window and look out at the dark?

R. I. Dundee was eating apple pie and announcing that he was going to remain for the night. Naturally he could leave whenever he pleased, since by his flight the man Cooper had confessed his guilt, but he was staying, and he wanted Brager and Ross, as soon as they had finished their coffee, to go with him to the laboratory.

Ross put down his coffee cup and said no, he would stay at the house. Dundee said he wanted him at the laboratory. Ross said stiffly that he was sorry, he couldn’t go.

“Why not?” Dundee demanded.

The young man stared at his father. “My God,” he blurted, “don’t you have any feeling about anything? Leave Miss Gladd here alone, with all — the way things are and the way she feels?”

“Nonsense,” Dundee said testily. “What good can you do her? Mrs. Powell is here, and those men around, and here’s Hicks. Certainly I have feeling. Is there anything any of us can do, Miss Gladd?”