Rex Stout - Alphabet Hicks

Ross said to his mother, “That’s when I knocked him cold. I grabbed the gun and beaned him with it.”

“D’Artagnan,” Hicks grunted. “Where’s the gun?”

“Right here.” Ross took it from his pocket.

“Let me see it.”

Ross hesitated.

“Don’t be silly,” his mother told him. “Give it to him. Is it loaded?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t look.”

Hicks did look. “It is,” he announced. He put the muzzle to his nose and sniffed several times, then slipped the pistol into his pocket. “People who jump over cars at men with guns,” he stated, “are too brave for this world, so they usually get sent to another one. Continue the explanation, Vail. It’s fascinating.”

Vail spoke as before to Mrs. Dundee. “So far, Judith, I have told you facts. I have not gone into theory. But I ought to, I’ll have to, to make you understand what I meant when I spoke of the vital necessity of a very careful and very rigorous discretion. Only before I do that I need some information myself. Doubtless Hicks can give it to me.”

“It’s yours for the asking,” Hicks declared. “What, for instance?”

“First about Cooper. He was shot?”

Hicks nodded. “While you were waiting there on the road for him but keeping yourself concealed. At six thirty-five Brager and Miss Gladd were in the office of the laboratory and heard a shot. They went outdoors and found Cooper with a hole in his temple, dead. Brager thought he heard movement in the woods, but saw no one.”

“Where were the rest of you?”

“Mrs. Dundee was in New York. So was I. Father and son were around the place somewhere. Outdoors.”

“Together?”

“No.”

“Then...” Dundee paused, and shook his head. “Where is that sonotel record?”

“Safe.”

“In whose possession?”

“If I say it’s safe, whose do you think? Mine.”

“Good,” Vail said approvingly. “I was afraid the police had it. Did you get it from young Dundee?”

“I got it by a combination of ingenuity, intrepidity, and dumb luck. From whom or where is for the present my business.”

“It doesn’t matter so long as you have it. I was afraid the police had got hold of it. Another item of information I need, Miss Gladd seems to have received a message that took her to the place where I was waiting. She seems to think I sent it, but young Dundee seems to think you did. Did you?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“That’s a question,” Hicks said judiciously. “Miss Gladd and I conversed in her room and agreed to sneak out of the house separately and meet down the road where I had a car. While she was sitting in the car with Ross, who was apparently already in training for the role of D’Artagnan, a boy came with a message that had been phoned to his home, which was near by. It was signed ABC, meaning me, I suppose, and told her to drive to a certain spot and find me in a car with the license JV 28.”

“Ah,” Vail said.

“Right. Ah.”

The fat folds of Vail’s lids were leaving him no eyes at all. He murmured, “The message was phoned to a near-by house.”

“Correct. You may have time out to reflect on that if you—”

“I don’t need to reflect. The conclusion is obvious. You didn’t send the message, if for no other reason, because you didn’t know I was there in that car. I couldn’t have sent it, because I didn’t know where Miss Gladd was. Who did know where she was besides you? You say you conversed with her in her room. Could Brager have overheard you?”

“Brager?” Hicks’s eyes glittered. “Now you’re putting on speed. I didn’t see that one go by. Why Brager?”

“Could he have overheard you?”

“Well — his room is next to Miss Gladd’s, but there’s a wall between them and we kept our voices down.”

“Bah,” Vail said contemptuously. “Brager probably has that house wired like a central for experimental purposes, and a sonotel mike the size of a prayer book will pick up a whisper at twenty feet. Unquestionably he heard you, and he telephoned the message.”

“Say he did.” Hicks’s brow was creased. “For the sake of the argument. I still can’t see you. What put that playful idea into his head?”

“I don’t know, but it isn’t hard to guess. A double motive, I should say. Cooper was dead. Brager thought I might possibly get from Miss Gladd the information I had hoped to get from Cooper; and he wanted to be sure Miss Gladd got away, not only from that place but also from Dundee — and from you who were in Dundee’s pay. He knew she was in danger, because she was dangerous. She might at any moment, by any chance, meet Mrs. Dundee and hear her voice, and that could not be permitted to happen.”

“Oho!” Hicks ejaculated. “Now I get you! Brager and I would make a good team. The same thought struck me.”

“Do you mean,” Mrs. Dundee demanded, “that Brager wanted to get her out of reach of my husband? Of Dick?”

“I do,” Vail asserted. “Dick was desperate because he was in deadly peril. If anyone learned of the amazing resemblance between your voice and Martha Cooper’s — if the police ever got that tip and got started on that trail — they were sure to get him for the murder of Mrs. Cooper and her husband. And they still are. That’s what I’m here to tell you. They still are!”

The reaction to Vail’s startling pronouncement, while not violent, was noticeable. Heather gripped Hicks’s arm and stared at his face inquiringly. Ross stood up and uttered a word not in common use in the presence of women. Judith gazed directly at Vail, if not in complete disbelief, in scornful incertitude.

“Nonsense,” she said sharply. “Dick might have trumped up something against me. I’ve refused to believe it, but I admit it’s possible. But he did not murder—”

“Please!” Hicks said peremptorily. He was cocking an eye at Vail, his head sidewise. “This is really a very fine theory. Beautiful! As I understand it, Dundee prepares to explode a mine under his wife by concocting this phony sonotel record. No sooner does he touch it off than the whole scheme is endangered by the unexpected return of Martha Cooper from abroad. Ross has heard the record. If he meets Martha Cooper and hears her speak, with a voice so amazingly like his mother’s, he is bound to smell a rat; and there is Martha, right there on the place. So Dundee seizes a lucky opportunity and kills her.”

“Bosh!” Judith said incisively.

“No, no,” Hicks protested. “Not bosh at all, as a theory. Dundee having acted impulsively and impetuously, which is in character, finds upon reflection that he is still in a hole and even a deeper one. He not only reflects, he probably hears things. With wires and sonotels and God knows what all over that house, he almost certainly hears things. He may have heard Ross and Miss Gladd discussing that sonograph plate. He may have met Cooper and talked with him when Cooper went there this afternoon. He knows that his wife may show up out there at any moment, especially since she has heard the sonotel record, and he knows I have the record. At any rate, as Vail has said, he knows that if either Cooper or Miss Gladd meets his wife and hears her speak, he is in for it. So he kills Cooper.”

“This is absolute—” Judith began.

“Don’t do that,” Hicks told her. “We’re working on Vail’s theory, and it’s a beaut. It’s the only one that fits the known facts. Vail is intelligent enough to realize that. He also realizes that if we all keep our mouths shut, if we give the police no hint of all this shenanigan about the sonotel record, Dundee is safe. They’ll never even seriously suspect him, let alone hang it on him. Isn’t that it, Vail?”