Rex Stout - Alphabet Hicks

Manny Beck groaned.

“Pretty good speech,” Hicks said.

“Well?”

Hicks shook his head. “No. You and the people of the State of New York have too much in common. I wouldn’t trust either of you to tell up from down. They kicked me out of my profession because I didn’t keep my mouth shut when I saw a rotten stinking piece of injustice being perpetrated in one of their courts, and now you say they want me to get chummy with you and tell you everything I know about a bunch of people who are having trouble. They can go right on wanting. Nowadays I make my own decisions regarding what I tell and don’t tell, and especially whom I tell and don’t tell. You say you’re going to catch this murderer. I don’t think you are. I don’t believe you’re ever going to get a smell of him. I think I’m going to catch him.”

Corbett cleared his throat.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Beck straightened up in his chair. “The only thing in God’s world that would get under this guy’s hide is three hours in the basement.”

Hicks smiled at him. “You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?”

“I would indeed, son. I would indeed.”

Corbett said, “You may regret this. I’ll try to arrange that you do. Meanwhile, stay on the premises.”

“What am I charged with?”

“Nothing. But don’t leave.”

“I’ll make my own decision about that too.”

“You will? Then it’s like this. If you try to duck you’ll be arrested as a material witness. I can back that on the strength of your offer to deliver Cooper this afternoon. You may even have known where he was, and his movements since he skipped last night are certainly a vital part of this investigation.”

“Oh, I’m willing to tell you that.” Hicks stood up. “I took him home with me and gave him a good bed and a good meal. Then he came up here to get killed. Also he stole my candy.”

“Ha, ha,” Corbett said.

“You’re as funny as a funeral,” Beck growled.

“When I do tell you something,” Hicks complained, going out, “you don’t believe it.”

At the moment of middle twilight when Hicks was backing his car into the pasture lane, Heather Gladd was up in her room, seated by a window, looking out but not seeing anything. She had gone there as soon as her interview with the district attorney had ended.

She was thinking about herself. Until yesterday she had never seen a dead person except in a coffin. Then her sister — who had been the only person alive whom she had deeply loved — so suddenly and unexpectedly and shockingly. Then George, with the two flies at that hole in his head. What she was thinking about herself was that she was a completely different person from what she had been two days ago. Then her attitude toward the emotional tangle in which George and Martha and she were involved had been unbelievably puerile and infantile, in spite of the tears she had shed. She had been exasperated and petulant, that was all, as at some petty annoyance like finding that all her stockings had runs in them. And she would have gone on like that, she admitted grimly, possibly forever, a frivolous shallow simpleton, if death had not come to teach her. She had literally not known that there was anything in the world as ugly and final as death, and that things that happen between people could bring it. The first thing about death, when it came close to you like this, was that it made you feel dead yourself. She had not cried since she had found Martha dead. That was because she was dead herself. Yet she had acted sometimes as if she were alive — for instance, with Ross Dundee about those sonograph plates. Why hadn’t she simply gone and got them and given them to him? What difference did it make now? And why had she acted...

That knock was at her door.

She got up and crossed the room and opened it.

“Oh,” she said.

“May I come in?” Ross Dundee asked.

“Why — why, yes.” Heather stood aside. “I thought maybe they were sending for me.” She started to close the door, decided not to, changed her mind, and closed it.

Ross stood. She stood. Their eyes met. “They may not send for you again,” he said lamely. “I hope not.”

“It doesn’t matter. Only I can’t tell them any more than I’ve already told them.”

“You were sitting down. Sit down.”

She hesitated, then returned to the chair by the window. He went and stood in front of her. Silence.

She looked up at him. “Did you want to ask me something?”

“Well, I... wanted to tell you something. To say something. This is the first time I’ve ever been in this room.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. I started to come in several times when you weren’t here, but I never came farther than a step in. I had an odd feeling about it.” He dismissed it with a gesture. “But that wouldn’t interest you. I don’t imagine anything anybody named Dundee could possibly say would interest you.”

“I have nothing against anybody named Dundee.”

“You ought to have,” Ross said bitterly. “You have every reason to. You’ll always remember this place, and us, with — I don’t know what. Hate, I suppose. I know that and there’s nothing I can do about it. I admit I didn’t believe you when you said Cooper didn’t kill your sister. I thought he had. Now I don’t know what to believe. It’s impossible that anyone here could have killed them, no one had any reason to, so I suppose the only thing to believe is that someone came when she was here, and went in the house and got the candlestick and killed her, and came back today when he was here and killed him. I realize how crazy that is, but it’s the only thing I can believe, because if that wasn’t it my father must have done it. You didn’t and Brager didn’t and I didn’t and Mrs. Powell didn’t. You say that fellow Hicks was with you at the laboratory yesterday, so he didn’t.”

He stopped. In a moment he went on, “One thing you said yesterday. About my father and me being here when your sister was killed. I said it was stupid, but it wasn’t. What do you know about us? How do you know we’re not homicidal maniacs? It was me that was stupid, not you. Of course, I know I’m just a plain ordinary dub, but you don’t.”

“You don’t think you’re a dub at all,” Heather declared, meeting his eyes. “You think you’re pretty hot stuff.”

“I do not!”

Heather made a gesture.

“All right,” Ross said savagely. “You’ve had me wrong from the start, and now nothing will ever change you. I realize that. But today I realized that it was actually possible that you suspected me of killing your sister! Why shouldn’t you? How do you know I didn’t?”

“I never said—”

“I know you never said it, but you hinted at it. And now Cooper too. At the time he was killed I was down at the old orchard. I didn’t even hear the shot. I know nothing, absolutely nothing, of who killed him or your sister, or why, or anything. Do you believe that?”

“No.”

“But you must! You must believe it!”

“It isn’t a question of must. What I believe and don’t believe—”

“But you have simply got to!” Ross came a step closer. “I can stand your not liking me, and your not caring a damn about how I feel about you, about how I love you, I can stand that because I can’t help myself, but you’re not going away from here thinking that I had anything to do, anything at all, with the terrible things that happened here! You are not! You have no right to think a thing like that about me!”

“On the contrary,” Heather asserted, “I have.”

“You have?”

“I not only have a right, I have a reason.”

“Reason?” He stared at her. “You have a reason—”