Rex Stout - Alphabet Hicks

Hicks pointed to the card which the other still held in his fingers. “Those letters. That’s what they stand for. To save you the trouble of asking. Sometimes they help to open a conversation, but in this case of course Jimmie Vail’s name would have been enough. Wouldn’t it?”

“What about Vail? What do you want?”

Hicks smiled at him. “First I’d like to get acquainted a little. If I bounce it right back at you, what I want, you’ll probably tell me to get out, as Vail did, and then where are we? The way you look, on edge the way you are. And with that stubborn mouth you’ve got. But I guess I can lead up to it. Yesterday afternoon your wife paid me two hundred dollars.”

“My wife! — ” Dundee goggled at him. “For what?”

“For nothing. That’s the sad part of it. It happened that I needed the money, so I took it. If you made the money and it’s being wasted, it’s your own fault. I’ve never heard of anything dumber than a man accusing his wife of treachery and claiming to have proof of it, and then refusing to produce the proof or even to discuss it. Whether she’s guilty—”

“Get out!” Dundee said. His voice trembled with rage.

Hicks shook his head.

Dundee stood up. His hands were shaking. “Get out!”

“No,” Hicks said, not moving and not raising his voice. “You ought to see yourself in a mirror. Your wife thinks you’re out of your head and she may be right. If you handled your business problems the way you’re trying to handle this one, by simply having a fit, you’d have been bankrupt long ago. I’ve come here to make you an offer, and I’m going to make it before I leave.”

“I don’t want any offer—”

“How do you know till you’ve heard it? If you’d let your brain cool off a little, you’d realize that I’m in a position to get you what you want. Your wife has paid me money. She has confidence in me. You told her it was useless for her to try to deny she had sold your business secrets to Vail, you knew she had done it; what you wanted from her was the full story so you could decide what to do. What if I can get that out of her? Wouldn’t that help?”

“I see.” Dundee’s lips worked, and he clamped his jaw to make them stop. He gazed down at the other’s face.

“That would be worth something, wouldn’t it?” Hicks argued. “But of course you’d have to give me something to work with. For instance, that proof you were going to show her — I’d have to know what that was — I’d have to know enough of what you know to be able to impress her—”

“Ha,” Dundee said derisively. “You would?”

“Certainly.”

“Where did you see Vail?”

“At his office.”

“Did my wife send you to him?”

“No. I was just poking into holes.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“I think it’s fairly credible.”

“I don’t. What are you, a lawyer?”

“No. I’m just a guy. A sort of a freak. You might say, an outlawyer.” Hicks gestured it away. “I understand your reluctance. You don’t know whether I’m enough of a philosopher to double-cross your wife, or whether I’m trying to pull a fast one on you. That’s a risk you have to take. However, I can prove that I was disbarred from practicing law, and that ought to be a point in my favor. You can check that.”

Dundee had stopped trembling. His blood, obviously, was under control again; he had no longer the aspect of a man about to clutch a throat or pick up a chair and hurl it. He asked in a hard, even tone:

“Where did my wife get hold of you?”

“That’s a long story. I have a — I’ve had some notoriety.”

“I don’t doubt it. Of course you’re working for Vail.”

“No. I never saw Vail before today.”

“I don’t believe it.” Dundee’s nostrils bulged and subsided again. “I’d like to wring your damned neck. Get out of here.”

“I don’t think—”

“I said get out.”

Hicks, his lips pursed into an O as if he were going to whistle, sat for five seconds gazing up at the stubborn jaw and mouth, the cold fury of the contracted pupils in their bloodshot whites. Then he heaved a sigh, lifted himself to his feet in no haste, got his hat from a corner of the desk, and walked out.

After the door had closed, Dundee stood there without any change of expression, slowly rubbing his palms up and down the sides of his thighs. He kept that up a while, then sat and pulled his phone over and told it, “Get me the Sharon Detective Agency.”

Hicks sat on a bench in Bryant Park again, watching a pigeon strut. It was an utterly disgusting and sordid mess, and he was in for it. Not its least disgusting aspect was that he had only twenty dollars left of Mrs. Dundee’s two hundred. He could take the subway downtown and borrow a hundred and eighty from old man Harley and pay Mrs. Dundee back. He sat and watched the pigeon and considered that, and finally decided to eat lunch first.

But it was significant that instead of making for Third Avenue, where a plate of stew, with bread and butter, was twenty cents, he went to Joyce’s on 41st Street, got comfortable in one of the leather-upholstered booths, and ordered a double portion of baked oysters.

And it was there that he found a short cut to a trail which otherwise he would have reached only after long and laborious twists and turnings. He was spearing the last oyster when something so abruptly caught his attention, by way of his ear, that the oyster on his fork was halted in mid-air. He had been so preoccupied with his own concerns that he had been oblivious to the murmur and clatter of the restaurant, and probably would have remained so had not a sudden lull in the general noise cleared the way for an instant, so that he heard the voice quite plainly. It came from directly behind him.

It said, “...going now, and you can’t stop me!”

It was the voice of Judith Dundee.

The oyster still brandished on his fork, Hicks twisted his head. The voice went on. Enough reached his ear to confirm his recognition of it, and to tell him that it came from the booth adjoining his, over the back of the upholstered seat, but in the renewed surrounding noise no more words were audible. He could hear, or thought he could, a low urgent masculine voice replying to her, and was straining his ear to recognize it, when he became aware of swift and impetuous movement. Were they leaving? He slid to the edge of his seat and peered around, and got a view of a female figure, the back of it, in a gray woolen suit and a fur neckpiece, darting down the aisle. Alone. On sudden impulse he acted. Tossing a dollar bill on the table and grabbing his hat, he followed. As he passed the adjoining booth a glance showed him that it was occupied by a man about his own age, with a sharp pointed nose incongruous in a face white and puckered with distress.

By the time Hicks got to the sidewalk Mrs. Dundee was thirty paces away, headed east. He kept his distance. There were people — Inspector Vetch of the Homicide Squad, for instance, who would have richly appreciated the situation. Absolutely typical Hicks, Vetch would have said, tailing the woman who had hired him.

But he would have been wrong, as Hicks soon discovered for himself, when the gray woolen suit turned left on Madison Avenue and he caught a glimpse of its wearer’s profile. It was not Mrs. Dundee!

He stopped short. Then he went on again, impelled by logic. That voice had come from the booth behind his or he would cut off his ears. And that woman had come from that booth and there had been no other woman in it. At least he would hear her speak again. He closed up. She turned right on 42nd Street and entered Grand Central Station, and when she headed across the concourse for a ticket window he was only ten paces behind. There was a man ahead of her at the window, and as she stopped she turned for a look at the clock.