Rex Stout - Alphabet Hicks

“She has been lying to me for God knows how long,” Dundee said bitterly. “Living a lie!”

“You can’t reason with him,” Judith Dundee said wearily. “It’s no use. Either he’s mad, absolutely mad, or something has happened that I wouldn’t have believed — he wants to finish with me—”

Husband and wife stared at each other, as only a husband and a wife can stare when, after a quarter of a century of the little explosions that punctuate married life, a bomb has utterly destroyed all bonds of communication and understanding.

Hicks said, “Let’s drop that for the moment. I want to try something more interesting and possibly more helpful. Have you got a phonograph here?”

The stares went to him.

“What?” Judith asked in astonishment.

“A phonograph. I’ve got a record I want you to hear.” Hicks slipped the plate out of the newspaper. “If you—”

“What is that?” Dundee was on his feet, reaching, demanding. “Let me see that!”

Hicks held him off. Judith was on her feet too. “Is that—” She stopped, went to a large console against the wall which had been designed and decorated to match the furniture, and opened a lid. “This radio has a record player. Here...”

She turned dials. “This is the volume, this is tone control.” She made way for Hicks. He fixed the plate in position, turning the switch, saw that the pick-up arm was automatic, and stood there, leaning on a corner of the cabinet. A voice came from the loud-speaker:

“Good lord, let me sit down and gasp a while! I know I’m late, but I had...”

“By God!” Dundee blurted. “That’s it! Where—”

“Shut up,” Hicks commanded him sharply. “Your wife wants to hear it.”

Judith Dundee stood motionless three paces off from the cabinet, facing it, looking at the loud-speaker grill. Hicks watched her face. At the beginning it was intensely interested and faintly contemptuous, but at the first sound of Jimmie Vail’s voice she started with amazement and gaped incredulously. Then she was rigid again, her chin uptilted, her lips apart, and stood without moving a muscle right to the end. The automatic switch clicked and the disk stopped turning.

The effect on Dundee was pronounced. He had sat down and gazed as if hypnotized at the back of his wife’s head. Now he said, not with heat, not in triumph, but in a tone of gloomy and harsh finality:

“There it is. There it is, my dear.” He looked at Hicks and demanded, “Where did you get it? From Brager? From my son?” He looked at his wife again. “There’s nothing you can say. Of course. What have you got to say?”

She said nothing. Hicks addressed her:

“That’s the evidence I was telling you about last night. From a sonotel planted in Vail’s office. That’s what you hired me to do, get the proof your husband said he had. Done. Huh?”

Judith Dundee moved. In no haste, deliberately, she returned to her chair, sat, and folded her hands in her lap. With no glance at her husband, she looked at Hicks, and there was a tremor, the tremor of controlled passion, under the metallic hardness of her voice.

“Yes, you did it,” she said. “But you’re not done. I have quite a little property of my own. You can have it — any or all of it. Whatever it takes, whatever you want, when you find out how that contemptible trick was played, and who did it, and why.”

“Good God!” Dundee was gawking at her. “Trick! You mean you’re trying to deny it?” He pointed a trembling finger at the radio. “Did you hear it? Good God, didn’t you hear it?”

He left his chair and stood in front of her. “I know you, Judith,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “I know you’ve got iron inside of you. I didn’t ever think you would do a thing like this, but you did. Now you won’t admit it, I know you won’t, but I wanted to show you that I know. Not that I suspect, I know. ” He pointed a finger at the radio again. “There it is!” He shook the finger at his wife. “And I’m warning you about that other thing, your being up there yesterday. As your husband, I warn you! In that you’re not dealing with me, you’re dealing with the police. With murder! Do you want to be suspected of murder? Do you want this whole dirty business shouted about in a courtroom and printed in the papers? Will you, for God’s sake, will you come to your senses and tell the truth, so we can decide what to do?”

“You are either crazy, Dick,” his wife said in the same hard voice, “or I have lived with you for twenty-five years without even getting acquainted with you. I’m not proud of that.”

“Look here,” Hicks said. “Both of you. You’re only making it worse. When I said listening to that thing might be helpful I meant it. I’m going to run it through again, and I want—”

An inarticulate noise came from Dundee’s throat, and he turned and tramped from the room.

Hicks gazed after him, then moved away from the radio and sat down. Mrs. Dundee pressed her palms to her eyes.

After a silence they heard, from a distance, a door closing.

Judith looked at her hands, dropped them again onto her lap, gazed at Hicks’s face a moment, and said, “I don’t like your eyes. I thought I did, but I don’t.”

“You’re tough, all right,” Hicks said admiringly. “Do you want to hear that thing again?”

“No. What good would that do?”

“Is it your voice?”

“No.”

“What!” His brows lifted. “It isn’t? At that, it may not sound like it to you. People are often astonished at a recording of their own voice.”

“It may sound like my voice,” Judith said. “I don’t know. But I know it isn’t me. It isn’t me simply because it couldn’t be! I never had any such conversation with Jimmie Vail, and another thing, there are some phrases that I never say. It isn’t me.” Her hand made a fist and hit her knee. “It’s a despicable trick! It—”

She got up and started for the radio, but Hicks was on his feet and there ahead of her, blocking the way.

“Don’t be absurd,” she said scornfully. “I merely want to look at it. Anyway, it’s mine. I paid you to get it for me.”

Hicks removed the plate from the turntable. “You can look at it,” he conceded, “but I’m delaying delivery.” He held it before her eyes. “Not that I have any use for it at present, but I think it’s going to be needed as evidence to convict someone of murder.”

She stared at him. “Nonsense,” she said shortly. “Just because that woman was killed at that place — it was her husband—”

“No. It wasn’t her husband.”

“But it was! The papers — and he ran away—”

“The papers print what they know, which isn’t much. I know more than they do, but not enough. Maybe I know who killed her, but I’m not—”

“If you think it was my son or my husband, you’re an idiot.”

“I’m not an idiot.” Hicks smiled at her, tucking the plate under his arm. “Nor do you think I am, or you wouldn’t be offering me all your worldly goods to find out who cooked this up.” He tapped the edge of the plate with his finger. “What I’m telling you, when I do find out, you’re going to get more than your money’s worth. You’re going to be a witness at a murder trial. The only way to avoid that would be to throw this thing in the garbage can, and leave the perpetrator of it undisclosed and unpunished. Is that your idea of a happy solution?”

Mrs. Dundee, meeting his eyes, said without hesitation, “No. I think perhaps you are being too clever. I don’t believe the murder of that woman, a stranger to all of us, had any connection with — this other.”

“But even if it had, I go ahead?”

“Yes.”